Merrick Garland, the Washington Post and the Nuclear Story If the threat is genuine, why didn’t the Justice Department treat it that way? James Freeman
If papers in former President Donald Trump’s home represented such a grave threat to national security, why did the Justice Department take so long to act on it? Among the implausible details of this disturbing story has been that after a Justice official and several FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago in early June, Justice waited several days before merely requesting that a stronger lock be placed on the door of a storage room and then waited roughly two months before seeking a warrant. Now a new report makes the theory of a significant security threat even harder to credit.
The Journal’s Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha report from Washington:
Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over the coming months.
The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior Justice Department and FBI officials, the people said. The warrant allowed agents last Monday to seize classified information and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago.
Weeks of meetings strongly suggest a gray area, not a clear and present danger. Mr. Garland’s long period of pondering is completely incompatible with a news report that has been widely circulated since last week. In a story published on Thursday and updated on Friday, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Perry Stein and Shane Harris reported for the Washington Post:
Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.
Their concern was so deep that they had to kick the issue around at meetings for much of the summer before trying to do anything about it? The Post report continued:
The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
If the history of anonymous sources speaking to the Washington Post about FBI national-security investigations related to Mr. Trump is any guide, the sources might also have sought anonymity because what they were saying was highly misleading. But maybe this time we should believe them. In its recent story the Post suggested that the world’s most dangerous documents might be vulnerable:
Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts said. Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries might view exposing their nuclear secrets as a threat, experts said.
One former Justice Department official, who in the past oversaw investigations of leaks of classified information, said the type of top-secret information described by the people familiar with the probe would probably cause authorities to try to move as quickly as possible to recover sensitive documents that could cause grave harm to U.S. security.
“If that is true, it would suggest that material residing unlawfully at Mar-a-Lago may have been classified at the highest classification level,” said David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section, which investigates leaks of classified information. “If the FBI and the Department of Justice believed there were top secret materials still at Mar-a-Lago, that would lend itself to greater ‘hair-on-fire’ motivation to recover that material as quickly as possible.”
For exactly how many weeks was Mr. Garland’s hair on fire before he signed off on seeking the warrant?
The Washington Post for its part has been on fire with a flurry of atomic stories. On Friday the Post published a podcast called “The nuclear documents.” Various other Post offerings built off the original report, including an “analysis” piece from Philip Bump headlined, “Event venues (like Trump’s Mar-a-Lago) are not good places to store nuclear secrets.” Is anyone arguing that they are?
This week the Post published still more “analysis,” this time from Timothy O’Brien of Bloomberg who raises the possibility that Mr. Trump concluded “he could sell himself — or, possibly, state secrets” for big money. Mr. O’Brien claims that Mr. Trump has suffered business setbacks and then adds;
That’s a lot of financial pressure, especially for someone already prone to be a money-grubber. It should also raise alarms for any rational observer concerned that Trump might have been inspired to use the powers and access to records that his presidency provided to rake in lucre by peddling classified information after he left the White House.
How are we supposed to take any of this seriously if Justice didn’t?
Comments are closed.
