toucana

“I am very worried for our agent Trump. They found everything at Mar-a-Lago, they got packages of documents. In all seriousness they say he should be executed as a person that was ready to hand off nuclear secrets to Russia” -(Vladimir Solovyov - ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’) Vladimir Solovyov is a pro-Putin Russian propagandist who hosts a satirical TV show called ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’ on Russia-1 every Sunday. It’s not exactly meant to be taken seriously - one episode earlier this year suggested that the Russian army should invade Great Britain and seize Stonehenge. The adage about ‘many a true word spoken in jest’ does however come to mind when reading some of their more outre attempts at SNL style humour about the classified documents raid at Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this week NYT reporter Maggie Haberman speculated in a podcast that some of the documents Trump stole and took with him to Mar-a-Lago pertained to the Russia investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller between 2017-19. https://www.businessinsider.com/maggie-haberman-trump-could-have-taken-mueller-probe-documents-2022-8?r=US&IR=T

As a topical side-bar on Classified Documents: Last October, a US naval engineer called Jonathan Toebbe and his wife Diana who worked in Annapolis Maryland were arrested on charges of attempting to sell US naval state secrets to a foreign power. Toebbe who had spent almost a decade working as a submarine propulsion specialist allegedly attempted to sell a large cache of blueprints and technical data for $5 million in cryptocurrency to a foreign agent who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/maryland-man-accused-spying-pleads-not-guilty-will-remain-jail-n1282002 His wife Diana allegedly acted as a lookout while her husband placed ‘dead drops’ of classified information on data cards hidden in peanut butter sandwiches and bandaid covers. In a surprise ruling Tuesday, federal judge Groh rejected a plea deal for 12.5 to 17.5 years offered on behalf of Jonathan Toebbe, and 3 years for his wife Diana. The judge rejected the proposed deal because it was too lenient in her view. The couple have now withdrawn their plea deal and will go to trial next year. The information Toebbe was trying to sell was said to be classified at the Confidential level (not at Secret or Top Secret levels). Which raises the interesting question of what sentencing guidelines would be considered appropriate by a judge for a person who stole TS-SCI and CNWDI restricted data and offered it for sale ?

My initial post did in fact frame a very precise question —> “Why in the world would an ex-president remove such material from the custody of the National Archives, and store it in an insecure basement area of his retirement home in Florida ?” The only plausible answer I can think of is that he planned to sell it to the highest bidder

I tend to start with facts - which I think ought to be the baseline of any rational and scientific debate. I then normally try and follow that up by offering a precis of any background information which has required spadework in terms of further research and fact checking on my part, and which I make available in my posts as a courtesy to anyone else who has taken an interest in the topic. I’m not quite sure why you find this approach to ‘discussion’ problematic. It may be because you think a discussion should be more of an exchange of subjective opinions. The actual etymology of the word discussion is however from the Latin noun discussio - which in turn comes from the Latin verb discutere - ‘to investigate’.

Reports of DOJ concerns about the possible presence of TS-SCI documents at Mar-a-Lago relating US to nuclear weapons came into sharper focus yesterday when some commentators raised the possibility that these might have been CNWDI (critical nuclear weapon design information) documents. https://www.directives.doe.gov/terms_definitions/critical-nuclear-weapon-design-information-cnwdi This is a DoD category of TS and RD (restricted data) information about the design and construction of nuclear implosion and fusion devices. In addition to the normal TS/RD markings, material of this type is also marked “Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information - DoD Directive 5210.2 Applies”. As previously noted, material of this type cannot be declassified by a presidential executive order alone, it also requires a separate sign-off from the DOE and the AEC under the Atomic Energy Act (1954) To give some idea of how serious this could be - it was the dissemination of CNWDI which led to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 under the Espionage Act of 1917. As one commentator put it - “10-20 isn’t the sentencing guidelines, it’s what the groundsman tells your family when they come to visit - Row 10/Plot 20”.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/08/12/mar-a-lago-raid-fbi-investigating-whether-trump-violated-these-3-statutes/?sh=88ab59725c1a This Forbes article lists the legal codes cited in the attachments to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant sought by the FBI as: 18 Code §§ 793 - Espionage Act (1917) 18 Code §§ 1519 - Destruction, alteration, falsification of records in a federal investigation (Obstruction) 18 Code §§ 2071 - Concealment or mutilation of federal documents The interesting legal nuance here is that the classification status of the documents involved is immaterial under these particular codes. This disposes of any claim by Trump that he ‘declassified’ them while still in office. Other reporting by ABC, CNN and BBC indicates that the FBI search team removed up to another 20 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago, and found at least 11 sets of classified documents including some classified as TS-SCI and some as TS.

The author Sir Salman Rushdie 75 has been attacked on stage at a literary festival being held in The Chautauqua Institution in New York USA https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-62524833 He is reported to have been stabbed in the neck by an attacker who rushed the stage. Rushdie was subsequently airlifted to hospital in a helicopter, and the attacker was taken into custody immediately by the police. Sir Salman Rushdie has been living under the threat of a fatwa calling for his death pronounced by the late Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeinei in 1989 in response to Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses (1988).

The information may well have beeen abstracted from the PDB (presidential daily briefing) which is a digest of intelligence agency briefings passed each day to the president and his top advisors. It was widely reported that Jared Kushner usually read this rather than Trump himself. Bradley Moss a National Security Attorney who was a guest on the MSNBC Last Word Show yesterday evening made the additional point that classified documents relating to the USA’s own nuclear weapons would fall under the Atomic Energy Act (1954) which has its own even stricter classification systems for RD (restricted data) which can’t be declassified by the President alone. They require a double sign-off from the Department of Energy and AEC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuNZL1wCoek

Classified Documents According to Reuters, the WP is reporting that the FBI search at Mar-a_Lago was prompted by concerns at the DOJ that the remaining 12 crates of White House documents unlawfully taken there by Donald Trump contained classified documents about nuclear weapons. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-attorney-general-garland-confirms-fbi-investigating-trump-2022-08-11/ A Twitter thread posted by Mark Hertling offers an overview of federal document classification systems in the US: https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1557911337468133377 Briefly, the sequence in ascending order of sensitivity is Confidential Secret Top Secret SAP (Special Access Program) SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) The latter is often referred to as TS-SCI and is normally only handled and read in special rooms known as a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) - photo below. Other reporting in the WP had already raised concerns among military advisers that some of the documents taken to Mar-a-Lago were in the SAP or ‘Need to Know’ category - raising the obvious question as to why in the world would an ex-president remove such material from the custody of the National Archives, and store it in an insecure basement area of his retirement home in Florida ?

It seems that yesterday's 'no-knock' FBI search warrant at Mar-a-Lago could actually be the key to ensuring that 45 is never able to run for public office again As this commentator points out, under 18 U.S. Code § 2071 - a conviction for concealment or removal , or mutilation of public records and documents disqualifies you from holding any other office under the United States.

Engineer Mae Jemison became NASA's first African American woman astronaut, and flew an 8 day mission STS-47 onboard space shuttle Endeavour from the 12th to the 20th September 1992. Each day she began her duty shift by quoting Lt. Uhura “Hailing frequencies are open“ as her comms test. https://web.archive.org/web/20150621152840/http://news.stanford.edu/stanfordtoday/ed/9607/9607mj.html

There were actually three substantial talking points raised by Liz Cheney on the basis of that video which I flagged up in my last post. Probably the most interesting one was the third one, which raises the question of whether people who effectively take up arms against the constitution - as well as the truth - can be successfully excluded from ever running for public office again ? The most promising legal avenue would appear to be Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment 1868 which is discussed in some detail in this Lawfareblog`: post.https://www.lawfareblog.com/disqualifying-insurrectionists-and-rebels-how-guide Suffice to say, there appears to be some unexpected wiggle-room here, because a few lawmakers have apparently argued that the president is not an ”Officer of the United States”, which neatly evades the conditions relating to ‘triggering offices’ as set out in the Enforcement Act of 1870. (Trump quite uniquely never held any sworn Federal or State level public office prior to being elected president ) You might then say, OK let’s arrest, indict and convict 45 and send him off to prison to ensure he never runs for president again. The problem here is that there is no stipulation in the US Constitution to say that a presidential candidate cannot be a prisoner - in fact they don’t even need to be registered to vote. https://prisoninsight.com/can-you-run-for-president-in-prison/ Two men have actually run for the US presidency while imprisoned - Eugene V. Debs (1920) and Lyndon Larouche (1992) - nothing prevented either of them from doing so.

So - Liz Cheney the Deputy Chair of the Jan 6 Committee just used the very same Steve Bannon video clip posted by MotherJones - and cited at the start of this thread - as the centrepiece of her scathing peroration during her closing address to the eighth and final public hearing of the Jan 6 committee tonight. She made three powerful points in doing so - First she cited Bannon’s remarks as supporting evidence of Donald Trump’s own manifest premeditation in concocting the big lie about the election being ‘stolen’, and instigating the violent assault the Capitol of Jan 6th 2021. Second - Liz Cheney made a strong gender-mark contrast between the cowardice of “Sixty and seventy year-old men who hide behind executive privilege” - and the courage shown by a number of young women such as Cassidy Hutchinson and Sara Matthews who had the integrity to step forward and testifty under oath in front of a television audience of millions, and did so in spite of the certain knowledge that they would be viciously demeaned and attacked by followers of the Trump and Bannon cult for having done so. Her third and final point was that no-one who predicates their political agenda on mendacity of this magnitude should ever again be entrusted with any position of authority in the country.

Here is a longer video by CNBC on the same topic: The Salton Sea has a strange history. The modern surface lake was formed in 1905 as the result of a monumental civil engineering screw-up involving an irrigation canal system intended to take water from the Colorado river. It took two years to stem the outflow of water, by which time an accidental 15m by 35m lake had been created. The lake grew in size and became a fashionable seaside holiday resort in the early 1950s, before changing patterns of agricultural water extraction and usage caused the entire lake to start evaporating and vanish once more, leaving the former resorts and marinas as dust-blown ghost towns There is an atmospheric film called The Salton Sea (2002) - a crime thriller directed by D.J. Caruso and starring Val Kilmer set in this location.

MSNBC legal commentator Glenn Kirschner made an interesting point on this today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9vI23c0q5U Kirschner says that during his 30 year stint as a federal prosecutor in Washington DC, the attorneys office there used the Secret Service forensic science divison rather than the Metropolitan police department, or the FBI lab at Quantico, to handle any criticially important data recovery from seized computers or cell phones. Kirschner says they did so because the USSS forensic science service had a stellar reputation for handling probative searches of cell phones in particular. The idea that they somehow lost the critical text messages for just Jan 5th & 6th 2021 during a bungled device replacement process, and can’t now recover these from backups is beyond ridiculous. Small wonder that the head of the USSS James Murray abruptly resigned last week.

I posted this for additional context. I always think it is useful to know to whom remarks of this type were being addressed, and what sort of political affiliations and backgrounds are involved. You say that "nothing about this is really new" - Well I'd say that unless you are unusually well informed about the involvement of Bannon and other right-wing US political extremists with Far Eastern disinformation networks like G News, then you almost certainly don't know the full extent of the pernicious role these groups have played (and continue to play) in US politics, especially their role in pushing scientific falsehoods about COVID-19 during the pandemic. My background is in Far Eastern Studies so I tend to take an interest in the activities of individuals like Guo Wengui.

According to Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman, Steve Bannon made these remarks shortly before the US 2020 presidential election in the HQ of G News, a right-wing disnformation network associated with an emigre Chinese billionaire called Guo Wengui (郭文贵) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09jjIi88Sa8 Guo Wengui fled China in 2017 and is currently wanted there on charges of bribery, kidnapping, money- laundering, fraud and rape. He subsequently settled in USA and became a member of Trump’s exclusive Mar-a-Lago club in Florida before setting up G News in tandem with Steve Bannon. This media outlet played a prominent role in promoting disinformation about COVID-19 during the pandemic - specifically fabricating and circulating false claims that the COVID was deliberately created by a Chinese biological warfare lab in Wuhan. He has also promoted conspiracy theories against Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and G News also actively disseminates QAnon propaganda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui in August 2020 Steve Bannon was arrested by FBI agents in Maine in connection with his border wall fraud scheme onboard a $28 million yacht called Lady May owned by Guo Wengui - Bannon was subsequently pardoned by Trump. In February 2022 Guo Wengui was reported to be facing a $134 million fine from a US NYSC judge for illegally hiding this same yacht in the Bahamas outside of US jurisdiction as part of a fraudulent asset concealment scheme. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/guo-wengui-bannon-judge-order-b2012475.html

The Bannon Gambit On Tuesday, the Mother Jones website released a leaked audio clip of Steve Bannon discussing Trump’s post election strategy in private with some close associates on Saturday October 31 2020. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/leaked-audio-steve-bannon-trump-2020-election-declare-victory/ The audio clip discloses what some commentators have previously called the ‘Pigeon Gambit’ in chess - a term that was originally coined by Scott D. Weitzenhoffer in 2005 to describe the problem of trying to debate evolution with creationists: "it’s like playing chess with a pigeon. It knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, then flies back to its flock to claim victory”. The chilling part of the newly released audio clip - as Bannon gleefully makes clear - is that if Donald Trump had succeeded in his plot to corruptly seize power in November 2020, then there would have been no more elections in USA - ever.

“Michael Gove went to 10 Downing St with the metaphorical bottle of whisky and a revolver, but clearly Boris Johnson has downed the whisky and turned the revolver on Michael Gove” - (Conservative MP Tim Loughton) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQiAA9JsZAA

The current tally now stands at 42 resignations from cabinet in just 24 hours - an all-comers' record. Johnson has also sacked Michael Gove the 'Levelling Up Minister' who was the first senior cabinet member to advise him to go. The full list of resignations is here: https://news.sky.com/story/cabinet-resignations-whos-staying-and-whos-going-ministers-reveal-if-they-are-backing-boris-johnson-after-rishi-sunak-and-sajid-javid-quit-12646480

The British Government is in complete chaos, and is on the brink of collapse tonight. PM Boris Johnson has been hit with 38 resignations from his cabinet staff, including the Chancellor of The Exchequer, and the Health Minister in the last 24 hours. A delegation of other cabinet colleagues including the Home Secretary and the replacement Chancellor (who was appointed only yesterday) are said to be at Downing Street tonight trying to persuade the PM to resign - which he is currently refusing to do. Attempting to explain the sequence of scandals which has led to this situation is no simple task, but this article by CNN offers a reasonable overview: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/06/uk/boris-johnson-scandals-intl/index.html One practical difficulty is that Boris Johnson survived a parliamentary No Confidence vote brought by his own Conservative party barely a month ago. Under existing Conservative party rules, they can’t bring another such motion for at least 12 months. That however is likely to be dealt with by an emergency rule change later tonight, if all else fails

Apparently a spokesman for the US Secret Service is now telling media outlets that Tony Ornato, the former WH deputy head of operations, and Bobby Engel the driver, are prepared to offer testimony disputing the latest account of what happened inside the presidential SUV on 1/6. The one big problem is that Cassidy Hutchinson was deposed under oath in a public hearing, and spoke under penalty of perjury if she lied. The Jan 6 committe and Miss Hutchinson’s lawyers have now invited these two SS agents to do likewise - Don’t hold your breath, because I don’t think either of them will be in any great hurry to do so. Tony Ornato was actually removed from the presidential protection detail within minutes of president Biden taking office in 2021, because Ornato was widely seen as a total Trump sycophant who simply could not be trusted with the responsibility of protecting his successor. Even senior Republicans distrusted him, notably VP Mike Pence who flatly refused to get into a limousine sent by Ornato to remove him from a Capitol basement parking bay in the middle of the 1/6 mayhem. “I trust you” Mike Pence told his own personal SS guard, “But you aren’t the one driving the car”. Pence seriously feared that once driven away from the Capitol, he would be placed on a plane and flown to a ‘secure location’ in Alaska. He chose to remain in the Capitol and complete the electoral count. There are credible reports that a number of members of Trump’s SS security detail were such gung-ho supporters of the MAGA movement, that they were posting messages on their personal social media accounts, cheering the insurrectionists along on their march to the Capitol - even though the SS agents, of all people - would have known from 11 a.m. onwards that there were people carrying AR-15 rifles and Glock pistols in that crowd. Attached is a clip of a panel discussion from last night that includes Carol Leonnig the Pulitzer prize award winning journalist for the WP who has also written two books about the Secret Service. They discuss these issues in some detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h0ci208Txo

An interesting article by Jill Lepore published in the New Yorker in May 2022 makes the point that the 4,000 words of the US Constitution written in 1787 contain no references to women https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-there-are-no-women-in-the-constitution That is by no means the end of of the derelictions in the Constitution either. It doesn’t mention, black people, Jews, or people who identify as LGBT for example; nor does it have anything lucid to say about climate change, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, the internet, the expansion of the universe, the Hubble constant, the nature of dark matter, SETI - or a dozen other topics of pressing interest either. Most critical of all, the US constitution (in Ailto’s view at least) has nothing to say about a fundamental right to privacy. That at least seems to be the cornerstone of his decision to overthow 50 years of stare decisis, and to throw the USA into legislative chaos.