Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

OTFM. If he died tomorrow I'd be glad never to give him another thought, unless it was maybe to piss on his grave if I were in the area.

ultimately I'm getting the sense it doesn't really matter what he *planned* to do with it, just having it there is a huge fucking deal

This is exactly right. The example I saw on Twitter was a federal employee who took documents home to keep working on them after hours. The FBI came down the chimney and off to prison he went.

Is it a huge deal, though? Not to both-sides it, but did other presidents have boxes of classified stuff at their residences? I'm guessing they probably did. I'm sure that if they did, since they aren't fucking babies like Trump, they would have returned the boxes, when asked.

I actually really doubt any of them did, and if they did it's nothing even close to the magnitude of what Trump reportedly had

Is it a huge deal, though? Not to both-sides it, but did other presidents have boxes of classified stuff at their residences? I'm guessing they probably did.

Yes, it's a huge deal. No, other presidents did not do this.

August 2016 pic.twitter.com/6Fg3sq00CW

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) August 15, 2022

Ex-presidents do normally continue to get security briefings. Biden suspended Trump's because the latter is such a security risk. I doubt you'd find another ex-president who had the kind of stuff that Trump apparently had, though. As I understand it, the "SCI" stuff in particular normally does not leave its secure location.

the person who keeps coming to mind is General Petraeus, someone who really was just fucking around with classified info, but in the end that didn't matter. maybe its true that Trump wasn't planning to do anything with it, much like it could be true that "very fine people on both sides" was actually just referring to those who showed up early to express their enthusiasm for Civil War statues. or that "grab 'em by the pussy" was just something he pulled out of thin air to impress Billy Bush. but it's also true that Trump & his organization has a lot of well-documented shady dealings with hostile nations and that he has zero respect whatsoever for the law or the interests of America itself so

He has something like $800 million in loans coming due, and an inability to separate the public interest from his own.

No, other presidents did not do this.

Source?

I'm not asking about KEEPING stuff, just about taking it to their homes while they were president.

another thing is that Trump had basically no interest in this stuff while he was actually President, in fact the people briefing him literally had to dumb it down to a 5th grade level in order to get him to even pay attention. but now Kushner gets this insane, nonsensical $2 billion deal from the Saudis and suddenly he's stealing boxes of it? idk man pretty sus

c'mon, this FBI raid business is so last week

Full story from Washington Post:https://t.co/GmkJaQ5RPM

— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) August 15, 2022

It seems likely to me that within days of being sworn in that Trump went through as much classified information as he could (or directed that his trusted lackeys do so) in order to monetize as much of it as possible. It defies belief, in fact, that he wouldn't do exactly that. He took all the valuable stuff to Mar-a-Lago because he quite reasonably inferred that he would never face any consequences for doing so, since he's never gotten in real trouble for anything in his entire life. And here we are.

Prolly not, but I hope there's a way that they can determine if those documents have been scanned or photographed while they were in his possession.

Well, they were secured by a padlock. Eventually.

dont forget the Trump DC hotel which was about to go under until he won, at which point he used it to conduct official government business at insane markups

Trump models himself on a mafia don. Whatever he had in mind by keeping those documents, you can be sure he thought he could use them to increase his power or to make money.

Knowledge *is* power. He was already very smart and knew almost everything, which made him very powerful, but now these boxes of classified shit have taught him so much more, making him even more powerful! No one will be laughing when he completes his secret nuclear missile silo base below Mar a Lago. And when he starts wearing an eye patch we will know he has reached his final Emilio Largo form.

for DJI

Can a president legally remove declassified information from the White House?
No, according to security experts. There are other laws that protect the country’s most sensitive secrets beyond how it is classified. For example, according to Aftergood, some of the intelligence and documents related to nuclear weapons can’t be declassified by the president. Aftergood said such information is protected by a different law, the Atomic Energy Act.

Another law — called “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” — states it is illegal to remove documents related to national security from their proper place if it could risk the security of the country, no matter the classification level of the information.

“The classification is just one piece of the picture,” Aftergood said. There are other protections in the law that can make disclosure or unauthorized retention problematic or even criminal.

Removing certain property and documents from the White House would also violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires presidents to preserve official records during their time in office. The act says that records from a presidency are public property and do not belong to the president or the White House team. Violating the records act would be a civil, not a criminal, offense.

Who can access classified information?
Government workers and contractors must go through background checks to receive the necessary clearance to access classified information. The more sensitive the information, the more arduous the background check process a person would need to pass to get clearance. There is certain classified information that thousands of people can access. For other information, only a handful of people have the necessary clearance levels to access it. The president would have access to every document and all intelligence information.

Some workers have to sign nondisclosure agreements when they leave the government to ensure they do not discuss the secret information they had access to while on the job, said Javed Ali, a senior official at the National Security Council during the Trump administration who now teaches at the University of Michigan.

“You go through serious levels of background checks to get a clearance, and not everyone passes,” Ali said. “You want people who can be trusted with this sensitive information and do the right thing.”

from this

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/13/trump-warrant-classified-answers/

feel like Trump's passports getting seized is a pretty big deal

to say nothing of his apes

xp provided he's not lying, obv

I get that presidents aren't SUPPOSED to take documents out of the white house. I just want to understand if they DID take stuff from the white house, before Trump.

I can imagine presidents taking classified docs from the white house when they go to their other homes (e.g. Nixon's western white house) but these trips would be accompanied by secret service people keeping the docs secure en route and at their final destination.

don't they have library cards

Dud

When it comes to destroying everything he touches, Classic.

i had a dream last night that I was at Mar A Lago, like moving furniture or something and trying to avoid meeting Trump and that the tv was on and it was announcing that Sean Hannity had been killed

i don’t want to dream about these people!
ugh

i've probably mentioned the time i got within 5 feet of trump and failed to scream "YA JACKASS!!!!" at him. it was in 2012-13 or so, in DC. i often got lunch at the food court at the bottom of the old post office pavilion, the one Trump bought and turned into a corruption machine for visiting diplomats. it was known that he was thinking of buying the place, so it wasn't an enormous surprise to see him and a small entourage walk by. i wish i would have known what a gigantic fucking asshole he is, i would have pushed him into a fryer

You would have saved us all a lot of grief, Karl.

i knew he was an asshole, but he was also, i thought, permanently shamed at that point for having led the Birther movement for several years. it's so weird that, even now, the story of trump's rise politically is basically that he wanted to do it for many years but struggled to come up with the most racist strategy possible. once he hit on it, he was unstoppable

the good white evangelicals of america just could not get enough of this wonderful man

I thought his call during the campaign for a Muslim ban would have ended him. Instead it boosted him.

I had like 1000 of those moments. I still have those fucking moments, it’s awful

I talked to him on a call-in radio show once, probably late 90s. He was plugging some stupid memoir, and I chided him for saying that he regretted never getting a chance to date Princess Diana before her death. To my surprise, he took the criticism well and said others had told him the same thing

He used to be different - more articulate maybe, also a hint of self-deprecation (on Howard Stern, for example) that is just completely gone now... everything is just 'really bad' now

Don't get me wrong, he's always been a complete fucking tool, but it seems like his vocabulary has shrunk considerably

TRUMP: "By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!" pic.twitter.com/oD1tGbpjOl

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 14, 2022

He DID run all of US foreign and domestic policy through twitter decrees, so maybe he thinks that's how it works.

lol

NEW: According to a DOJ official, the FBI is NOT in possession of former President Trump's passports. Trump had accused the FBI of stealing his three passports during the search of his Mar-a-Lago home.

— Norah O'Donnell 🇺🇸 (@NorahODonnell) August 15, 2022

It’s always the last place you look (between your ass cheeks, where the last world war went)

Supposedly they had them but gave them back, which is the lie of the century per Republithugs

i will never get over "ReTruths"

^best Expose song

ReTruth, ReJustice, and the ReTrumpian Way

^and now we're on to Sacred Reich

Since posting that Newsweek (!) piece upthread, incl. that the recovered docs incl. a category that can't be declassified by a President, I've seen the statute for that category referenced elsewhere online---CNN and MSNBC's TV talking heads still seem a bit unemphatic about it---I suppose Trump might say he didn't know about that, and lawyers/staff shoulda told him, although some reports indicate that he was warned by somebody inside to give all this stuff back forthwith---speaking that word, and re what previous Presidents did, although that shouldn't determine what happens in this case---take a look in this time lens, my friends at a ruling I'm starting to hear more about, which led me to:

Court Orders Nixon to Yield Tapes; President Promises to Comply Fully
Justices Reject Privilege Claim in 8-to-0 Ruling

By John P. MacKenzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 25, 1974; Page A01

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday unanimously, and definitively, that President Nixon must turn over tape recordings of White House conversations needed by the Watergate special prosecutor for the trial of the President's highest aides.

Ordering compliance with a trial subpoena "forthwith," the court rejected Mr. Nixon's broad claims of unreviewable executive privilege and said they "must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial."

The President said he was "disappointed" by the decision but said he would comply. His lawyer said the time-consuming process of collecting and indexing the tapes would begin immediately.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger delivered the historic judgment in a packed and hushed courtroom. His 31-page opinion drew heavily on both the great cases of the court's past, as well as the pro-prosecution edicts of a court dominated by Nixon appointees.

Only a few times in its history has the court grappled with such large assertions of governmental power. As in most of those encounters, the justices concluded that the judiciary must have the last word in an orderly constitutional system even though its view of the Constitution is "at variance with the construction given the document by another branch."

Brushing aside warnings by presidential lawyer James D. St. Clair that it was in an impeachment thicket, the court handed down its 8-to-0 ruling hours before the House Judiciary Committee was scheduled to open debate on proposed articles of impeachment.

One justice, William H. Rehnquist, disqualified himself because of his previous association with former Attorney General John N. Mitchell in the Justice Department.

This goes with comments by some legal experts that the famously cautious Garland could have invoked one of the three laws he cited, in ordering the retrieval---but having those three laws involved indicates that he was thinking of (at least possible)indictments---so the Nixon ruling is starting to come up as basis for the way documents have been handled---even by presidents, as well as ex-president---before now.