I’ll get to the indictment presently, but there was another big story about document theft that I want to start with; in a wild new development in the theft of classified presidential records, the great Murray Waas has discovered, and posted the discovery right here on Substack, that it wasn't just Donald Trump who stole them; so, it seems, did his chief of staff Mark Meadows, who's been getting a lot of attention this week as we learn that he may have flipped on his old boss for a plea deal (the UK Independent says he did, using the code, “The Independent has learned that”, and “it is understood that”, that the Justice Department asks reporters to use when passing on information obtained from them on “deep background”) and this is one of the crimes he may or may not be pleading guilty to:
Former president Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, removed more than a thousand pages of classified documents from the White House late at night on the final evening of Trump’s presidency. according to government records and interviews with several individuals, with first-hand knowledge of the matter.
Chief among the sources being the testimony of Meadows’s aide Cassidy Hutchinson before the January 6 Committee, who was not only the witness of a bunch of document burnings in Meadows’s office fireplace, as you might remember, but also of the bulk photocopying and distribution of these documents, which has remained virtually unknown.
I say “virtually”; Waas says,
previously undisclosed details from an executive session interview she provided the House Jan. 6th committee—and reported here for the first time.
But in fact they were disclosed, in the document dump issued by Chairman Bennie Thompson on December 27 2022, the week he was getting all the material out before Kevin McCarthy had a chance to destroy or permanently hide it. A tweep who goes by “Diana Manister” posted about it,
and I followed up and started writing about it with a blogpost on New Year’s Day:
and I did find something that may be pretty significant, in regard to an issue we're already officially interested in, and literally nobody knows about it other than probably Liz Cheney and her colleagues on the Committee, who, if I'm getting this right, want us, or Jack Smith, to figure it out without their having to say it out loud. Serious, it looks an answer to some pretty big questions.
It's from the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony, as noted, and it seems to be a conversation about Meadows doing stuff with papers including throwing them into the fireplace, specifically things having to do with "the vice president's role on January 6th" and a conversation with Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania congressman at the center of the conspiracy to make Jeffrey Clark the attorney general and IMO the most likely candidate in the House for an indictment, and then it takes a kind of startling turn:
And more than that, in a more extended period. and some of them might have been from the President's Daily Briefing, but some of them might not, and Hutchinson isn't sure whether they were ever returned to the responsible staffer, Eliza Thurston, and then, starting December 28, some materials that were going to be "brought over" to the White House "for review" by our friend Mr. Nunes, ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:
That’s Devin Nunes (R-CA), the former chairman of the HPSCI, and also Trump’s mole there, in a manner of speaking. He served on Trump’s transition team, and after the inauguration inserted himself into the controversy over the new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his overheard conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the bizarre series of events in March 2017 in which he went to the White House to “brief Trump” on some information (on the imaginary wiretapping of Trump Tower) he had received—from the White House, “with a spokesman for Nunes claiming this provided ‘a secure location’ to view the material. Although Nunes had characterized his intelligence sources as whistle-blowers whose identities he had to protect, The New York Times reported that they were actually White House officials Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis” (two well-known traffickers in classified information).
Later, he was forced to recuse himself from the committee’s Trump-Russia investigation after a House ethics investigation into Nunes's coordination with the Trump administration concluded that "Nunes may have made unauthorized disclosures of classified information, in violation of House Rules, law, regulations, or other standards of conduct," but started his own “parallel” investigation, mostly devoted to the composition, by committee staffer Kashyap “Kash” Patel, of a four-page memo laying out one of the earliest conspiracy theories on the FBI’s investigation and its supposed reliance on the Christopher Steele reports, making it classified with the explicit intention of demanding its declassification, a kind of laundering technique of which Trump was to make a lot of use.
Now, at the end of December 2020, Nunes was again treating the White House as “a secure location”, asking Meadows to let him borrow the place for what seem to have been the Republican staffers on his committee—
Secure from what? I think it has to be the committee’s Democratic staff, or members (the House had a Democratic majority, as you know, from 2019, and kept it through the 2020 elections).
Waas’s account is missing everything about the Nunes and HPSCI connection, I have no idea why. He does claim to know something about the documents in question, that they’re the “Russia papers“ that Trump and Meadows were looking to to support Trump’s case against the FBI and US intelligence agencies; they had hoped that the documents would corroborate their thus-far baseless claims and conspiracy theories that the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies had spied on his 2016 presidential campaign with the intent to thwart his election, and failing that, conspired to drive him from office on false evidence—Trump had been attempting to get them declassified by the normal procedure in the last days of the term, without success, because of objections within the intelligence community and among US allies.
That does correspond in turn to something we can learn about that does have a certain connection with Nunes, the so-called “Russia papers” that Republican members of the HPSCI requisitioned by subpoena from the Justice Department and received in June 2018, “more than a thousand” documents (a pre-echo of Waas’s “more than a thousand pages”), acquired in the same aim, of looking for evidence of misdeeds on the part of the FBI in its political persecution of the innocent president. So I think we can be pretty sure that’s what these were.
Thus, staffers from the HPSCI were coming to the White House to study documents belonging to the HPSCI. But they never went back to the HPSCI. In the testimony, Hutchinson has to take a break to talk to her lawyer, and then she returns to explain:
They made multiple photocopies of these classified documents, right there in the White House, and gave them, who knows to whom—Hutchinson remembers only that Kevin McCarthy turned down his copy, and that Meadows took one home (it was several boxes, and she helped him load them in his car), with the intention of giving them to Hemingway and [John, not Don] Solomon, “individuals in the private sector”, but of course Hemingway works for The Federalist and Solomon for himself, since The Hill gave him the sack for his fabrications on Ukraine and Hunter Biden concocted in concert with Toensing and DiGenova, Lev ‘n’ Igor, and Rudolph Giuliani, and so on.
And now, not incidentally, John Solomon and the former Nunes flunky Kash Patel are working as Trump’s official representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration. And do you think one of those eight copies of the Russia Papers might have have ended up among the 80 boxes of presidential papers shipped off to Trump’s Palm Beach club that same evening, January 19 2021?
Because that certainly sounds like the documents Patel claimed were being housed at Mar-a-Lago when the news of the stolen documents first began emerging:
When news of the Mar-a-Lago documents began heating up in May 2022, Patel spoke with right-wing media outlets about Trump’s objectives in retaining these documents. He began laying out the defense that the documents had been “declassified,” and specifically identified Trump’s goal to release the information publicly. He described the content of the documents to include matters related to the FBI’s Russia investigation (Crossfire Hurricane), but also a much broader range of issues.
“It’s information that Trump felt spoke to matters regarding everything from Russiagate to the Ukraine impeachment fiasco to major national security matters of great public importance — anything the president felt the American people had a right to know is in there and more,” Patel told Breitbart on May 5. He also said, “Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves.”
Which ought to bring us, at long last, to the indictment unsealed yesterday, but the indictment doesn’t tell us anything about it, almost. It doesn’t give any clue as to whether any of the Russia Papers are included among the 31 classified documents it charges Trump with retaining unlawfully (out of the 300 or so classified items he stole altogether), presumably because that’s classified information, whether they are or aren’t. It doesn’t mention Meadows or Solomon or Patel. Finally, it doesn’t say anything about Trump’s motivation for stealing them and refusing to give them back, leaving most commentators to throw up their hands and suggest it was just for the kicks, or the lulz (which I find unbearably irritating, the suggestion, basically, that it’s not serious).
With one single exception, where we can identify what’s going on thanks to independent coverage by CNN, and where Meadows happens to be indirectly involved, when Trump, giving an interview to the ghostwriter of Meadows’s autobiography, starts complaining about a recent New Yorker article by Susan Glasser, portraying him as having to be stopped by General Milley in the last weeks of his term from attacking Iran, and waves what he claims is a classified document in their faces, saying it’s Milley’s idea to attack Iran, not his (an inversion of fact that the ghostwriter apparently dutifully incorporated into the book).
That’s not a lot of evidence to work with, but if you accept that Trump really did steal the Russia Papers, or rather that Nunes and Meadows stole them for him, and add to that the affinity for lifting classified documents shown by those other Trump minions, Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, and the activities of Kash Patel in 2020 when he was working under Ric Grenell at the Directory of National Intelligence—
Patel repeatedly pressed intelligence agencies to release secrets that, in his view, showed that the president was being persecuted unfairly by critics. Ironically, he is now facing Justice Department investigation for possible improper disclosure of classified information, according to two knowledgeable sources who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe. The sources said the investigation resulted from a complaint made this year by an intelligence agency, but wouldn’t provide additional details....
—you start seeing the outlines of a pretty clear picture of what Trump’s henchmen are usually trying to do when they’re doing something dodgy with classified material: sussing out stuff to make Trump’s perceived enemies, from Jim Comey to Mark Milley, look bad or preferably criminal and Trump himself look good and innocent. Maybe we can learn more from their actions than those of the helplessly ignorant and incompetent Former Guy.
This is particularly good. I was trying to explain your "narratology" idea to a friend recently, and I was struck again not just by how well it works (insofar as I understand its workings) but also by how it's a genuinely novel and useful tool that many journalists and commentators — who are poised on the edge of accepting it — would profit from (figuratively and literally).
In the present context, I'm struck by how many people who really should know better continue to express real bafflement at why Trump took the documents — Did he just want bragging rights, or souvenirs? (Of course not.) They have trouble with the revelations because they're so baffling. (Josh M. had a reasonably good — but still flawed in the way I'm discussing — reaction this morning, wherein he basically said, Stop trying to make this into more than it is; it's gravely criminal but at heart it's just stupid.)
What you've done in these two brief essays (today and in January) is answer all of that — shown how Trump can simultaneously be idiotic and inconsistent AND be the moving party in a complex and legitimate scheme to misuse the documents to his gain.
As always, I wish more people paid attention to the work you do — you deserve yesterday's "victory lap" and many more.
If you've got an NYRB subscription, you should read this:
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/06/10/the-ultimate-deal/