Normal people probably shouldn’t insist the government’s allegations against them are a complete fabrication if they know it’s highly likely that the Feds have evidence that proves them wrong. But Donald Trump is well past the point where his excuses need to make sense, as proven by the Republican response to a report that Trump was, in fact, hiding nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago.
Days after the August 8 raid of Trump’s Florida home, the Washington Post shed some light on why federal officials felt they had to take such an extraordinary step. “Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought” in the search, the Post reported on August 12.
Trump quickly added the “nuclear weapons issue is a hoax” to his choose-your-own-adventure-style defense (along with “they were already double secret declassified” and “Obama did it too”). He responded to the Post story with this Truth Social message:
And when the Justice Department released a partially redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain a search warrant from a federal magistrate, Trump pointed to the omission of the word nuclear in the heavily redacted document as proof of his innocence:
A few days later, he mused:
Well, now the Post’s sources say “nuclear” absolutely isn’t a “hoax” — and the government has documents that prove it. On September 6, shortly after a federal judge granted Trump’s request to have a special master review the materials seized at Mar-a-Lago, the paper reported that FBI agents found a document describing a foreign country’s nuclear capabilities among the unsecured papers floating around Trump’s residence 18 months after he left office:
A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.
Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.
Even Fox & Friends anchor Steve Doocy remarked on Wednesday’s broadcast, “That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you should have in your post-presidential desk drawer.” But Senator Marco Rubio, appearing on the show in his capacity as unofficial Trump defender, would acknowledge no such thing.
Similarly, Trump’s attorney, Alina Hobba, told Newsmax that she found the leak to the Post, but not its contents, “incredibly disturbing.” She also complained that the “left-wing media storytelling” about the raid has been “inconsistent,” “outrageous,” and “all over the map.”
And anyway, who really cares about this nuclear stuff? On Wednesday morning, Trump revealed that the Feds seized his medical and tax records, which are obviously highly confidential (even though every other recent president has just made that information public).
The joke’s on the Feds, though, because Trump’s medical records just prove that he’s a “perfect physical specimen,” like he told Sean Hannity while he was recovering from a serious bout with COVID. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, anyone who thinks it’s okay for the Feds to search a former president’s home is basically a commie.
More on the mar-a-lago raid
- Did the FBI Miss a Hidden Room at Mar-a-Lago?
- Trump Rummaged Through Boxes of Classified Materials at Mar-a-Lago: Report
- Trump Is Paying His Diet Coke Valet’s Legal Fees
