Trump Staff Handed Out Binder Full Of Russia Secrets, Oh No, Where Is Binder???

Well who would have ever thunk it?

One hundred years from now, we’ll all be dead. The country will either have descended into fascist authoritarianism, or been converted into an egalitarian paradise by our wonderful children. Or maybe it’ll be under three feet of boiling water. But whatever happens, descendants of today’s MAGA faithful will still be trying to prove that Hillary and Barack and Joe and the Deep State FBI and Ukraine and YOUR MOM conspired to do RUSSIA HOAXES to poor, innocent Donald Trump.

CNN has a blockbuster story — five bylines! — today about a binder full of classified documents that went missing on Trump’s last day in office. And, yes, that is bad. But it’s the slapstick, slapdash effort to declassify a mountain of stuff on the way out the door in an effort to prove that actually Vladimir Putin and his lackeys were pushing for Hillary in 2016 that caught our eye. What a perfect encapsulation of the Trump years: So pathetic and self serving, so obsessed with personal grievance, and most of all so utterly fucking inept.

The public first learned about the existence of the binder on January 19, 2021, when Trump put out an executive order purporting to declassify most of it. Trump was leaving the White House exactly the way he came into it four years earlier, obsessing over allegations that Russia had helped him win in 2016 and vowing to avenge himself on his enemies. His plan was to declassify a mountain of raw intelligence on the origin of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation and point to it as proof that the US government had lied about Russia’s efforts to get him elected.

The dossier (sorry, not sorry) was largely compiled by the House Intelligence Committee in 2018 under the leadership of Trump’s chief panty sniffer Devin Nunes. Nunes has since wandered off to become a sick joke in the private sector, where he’s currently the head of Trump’s media company. (Don’t worry, he still finds time to file garbage SLAPP suits.) But in 2018, he was the chair of Intel, where he spent his days trying to destroy the intelligence community and showing his whole ass to the world.

Most famously, Nunes once gave a press conference in the White House driveway claiming to be be bringing information to the White House about dastardly Deep State Dems illegally surveilling Trumpers. In fact this was information he’d been fed by the White House, and it involved communications which were incidentally collected by intelligence agencies as they surveilled foreign assets — think Mike Flynn getting picked up promising the Russian ambassador that Trump would lift sanctions. This is the shit that Trump was desperately trying to declassify before he got evicted from the White House, and this is why the intelligence community freaked the fuck out when Trump tried to dump it all on his way out the door. He would happily burn every source they had just to provide a jumble of data that his smear merchants could point to and say NO RUSSIA! NO RUSSIA! YOU’RE THE RUSSIA!

CNN reports that much of the material was “so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.” When Trump made it clear that he wanted to just tweet the whole thing out, Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump’s DNI John Ratcliffe flipped out about all the sources and methods Trump was going to blow up. But Trump didn’t give a shit about that, and neither did his chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was desperately trying to feed the dossier to disgraced former Hill editor John Solomon, so it could be laundered into the wingnut media ecosystem.

If we might block quote at you:

Solomon claims that on the night of January 19, Meadows invited him to the White House to review several hundred pages of the declassified binder. One of Solomon’s staffers was even allowed to leave the White House with the declassified records in a paper bag.

“Mr. Solomon’s staff began setting up a scanning operation for the complete set of documents to be released the next morning,” Solomon’s attorneys wrote in a court filing last month. “But as they set up the equipment, they received a call from the White House asking that the documents — still under embargo — be returned because the White House wished to make some additional redactions to unclassified information under the Privacy Act.”

[Meadows’s aide Cassidy] Hutchinson writes in her book that [White House Counsel Pat] Cipollone told her after 10:30 p.m. on January 19 to have Meadows retrieve the binders that had been given to Solomon and a right-wing columnist. “The Crossfire Hurricane binders are a complete disaster. They’re still full of classified information,” Hutchinson writes that Cipollone told her. “Those binders need to come back to the White House. Like, now.”

On Trump’s last day in office, Solomon stuffed the dossier into a Whole Foods bag and surrendered it to Secret Service agents. According to Hutchinson, Meadows delivered the semi-redacted copy to the DOJ, which eventually produced much of it in response to FOIA litigation — albeit in a more redacted form. That left the un-redacted copy which Meadows had been stashing in his office safe.

Hutchinson says Meadows drove off with the complete unredacted copy on the evening of January 19. Meadows says that never happened, and takes great umbrage at the suggestion that he would mishandle government documents. LOL. Whatever the truth of the matter, the dossier has never been recovered, despite a frantic search by the intelligence community and a whinyass lawsuit filed by Solomon. There are rumors of incomplete versions stored in boxes at the National Archives or floating around the DOJ — lesser gospels, impossible to authenticate.

And so the complete truth of Donald Trump’s innocence shall ever remain a mystery, buried like Joseph Smith’s golden plates somewhere on the shores of the Anacostia. If only it could be found, the Deep State plot to destroy this godly man could be proven, and they could finally LOCK HER UP Hillary Clinton as promised. But for now the MAGA faithful will have to believe it just ... ‘cause. I guess that’s kinda what Trump was going for.

[CNN]

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