There are dozens of outstanding questions about Donald Trump's bizarre decision to abscond with boxes of unauthorized and classified documents when he left the White House and we don't have any idea why he refused to return many of them when the National Archives and the FBI asked for them back. All we do know is that the FBI was forced to issue a subpoena, which Trump defied, and finally had to get a search warrant to retrieve the documents.
The speculation about his motives run from the former president just wanting to take classified material as a souvenir to show off to his friends or sell as memorabilia to possible blackmail of foreign leaders. (Apparently, presidents get highly classified intelligence on allies and adversaries alike.) The most alarming reporting suggested that the documents contained nuclear secrets. This seemed unlikely until this piece by Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo reminded me that Trump has a "special interest" in nuclear weapons, believing himself to be an expert because his uncle taught at MIT. Now it doesn't seem so outlandish. Trump was bragging in his final year that the U.S. had developed some secret new nuclear program at his direction which he couldn't reveal. So, who knows? He may have actually stolen something truly dangerous.
