Despite former President Donald Trump’s emphatic protestations to the contrary last month, it seems increasingly likely that, yes, he was actually hoarding classified nuclear weapons secrets at his unsecure Florida estate.
This week, The Washington Post doubled down on last month’s reporting that the now-infamous Mar-a-Lago search was, at least in part, related to nuclear weapons documentation, with a bombshell report that FBI agents had uncovered a “document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities” as part of their court-approved sweep of Trump’s property. Also allegedly recovered were other national security papers ordinarily kept so secure that their mere existence could only be shared by officials serving the presidential Cabinet level or higher.
The Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment to the Post about the alleged findings. A lawyer for Trump said leaks about what may or may not have been found at Mar-a-Lago “[do] not serve well the interests of justice” but did not dispute the specifics of the Post’s reporting.
The Post’s report comes as the former president’s legal team works to stymie the ongoing Justice Department investigation into which classified documents may have been illegally handled, taken, and stored by Trump over the past year-and-a-half since he left office. Earlier this week, Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon approved a request by the former president to appoint a “special master” to serve as a third-party filter to assess all the documents confiscated by the DOJ for not only attorney-client privilege, which is what special masters typically handle, but executive privilege as well — a move that prompted near unanimous outcry from various legal pundits and experts, including Trump’s own former attorney general, Bill Barr. While Cannon’s decision currently blocks the DOJ from accessing the documents as part of their investigation, it crucially does not halt the ongoing intelligence community review of the seized paperwork to assess any potential national security risks — something which, given the Post’s latest report, seems more urgent than ever.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s immediate reaction to the Post’s allegation arrived a) on his financially precarious Truth Social platform in the form of a b) characteristically self-aggrandizing/pitying bout of dubiously punctuated logorrhea.
Putting aside the fact that Trump almost certainly meant “no-no” and not “NO, NO,” the former president’s hysterics feel particularly, well, hysteric, given the explosive nature of what was allegedly discovered in his possession.
Meanwhile, the specifics of the documents remain — and likely will remain for quite some time — under wraps. Still, with this latest report that Trump did, in fact, abscond office with a host of the country’s most closely guarded national security secrets after all, it seems as if this whole saga, with its myriad of political and criminal ramifications, has only just begun.
