Classified Documents

[geordief]

32 minutes ago, zapatos said:

They were not found scattered about. The picture was not taken for public viewing but as a standard method of documenting what was found by spreading them out so a clear picture could be taken. Doesn't help to take a picture of a box when you cannot see what is in it. It was only released because it dispels Donald's narrative.

Donald is just too dumb to know what the picture was.

Next he'll be telling us that the FBI is using human clones because he saw a pic of an FBI agent in Mar-a-Lago and then LATER SAW A PIC OF THE SAME MAN IN WASHINGTON D.C.!!! TRUTH!!! COVFEFE!

When I went to the States I was questioned at Kennedy airport on the way in from Europe  and again at San Diego returning from Mexico.

 

It was the same eagle eyed immigration  official who recognized me 6 months later  across the crowded  concourse as I tried to avoid his notice.

 

Luckily  my papers were in order as he had docked my visa stay length  the first time as he suspected I was seeking work in the country. 

 

He wasn't a clone and neither was I .I doubt we would recognize each other 50 years later.🙂

 

I was dumb enough to  suppose TFG had indeed left the docs in that disorder so perhaps he needed to address this as he looked bad in the eyes of his equally dumb followers(not all as dumb but some are and he still needs their support)

[toucana]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62771613

According to a newly unsealed inventory of material seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, agents retrieved 33 boxes of documents that included inter alia:

• 3 documents marked confidential
• 17 documents marked secret
• 7 documents marked top secret
• 43 empty folders with classified banners
• 28 empty folders labelled "Return to staff secretary/military aides"

That would appear to indicate at least 16 sets of folders with classification cover sheets that are now missing their contents. Where would those be now I wonder ?

[TheVat]

When they say 43 empty classified folders, does that mean to imply that all those documents are missing, and that the 27 documents listed did not match any of those folders?  OTOH If you knew that 27 documents could be matched to specific folders then is the term "empty folder" simply a description of the materials as found, i.e. were they just temporarily removed from folders to be perused and then sloppily never returned to those folders?  How are folders labeled, beyond their classification banner?  As for the possible 16 folders that are orphaned, do we know that their contents were not returned earlier this year - i.e. could they have been returned in a sloppy form, just one big stack minus folderage?  Or were they part of the other huge mass of material (some 1500 documents) that was removed from his office  Sorry, I haven't followed all this in the fine-grained detail that would give me a clearer sense of whether we are looking at destruction or spectacular sloppiness or both.  

 

 

 

[StringJunky]

8 minutes ago, TheVat said:

When they say 43 empty classified folders, does that mean to imply that all those documents are missing, and that the 27 documents listed did not match any of those folders?  OTOH If you knew that 27 documents could be matched to specific folders then is the term "empty folder" simply a description of the materials as found, i.e. were they just temporarily removed from folders to be perused and then sloppily never returned to those folders?  How are folders labeled, beyond their classification banner?  As for the possible 16 folders that are orphaned, do we know that their contents were not returned earlier this year - i.e. could they have been returned in a sloppy form, just one big stack minus folderage?  Or were they part of the other huge mass of material (some 1500 documents) that was removed from his office  Sorry, I haven't followed all this in the fine-grained detail that would give me a clearer sense of whether we are looking at destruction or spectacular sloppiness or both.  

 

 

 

Tick all boxes that apply, not just one.

Edited September 2, 2022 by StringJunky

[Peterkin]

2 hours ago, toucana said:

That would appear to indicate at least 16 sets of folders with classification cover sheets that are now missing their contents. Where would those be now I wonder ?

They could very easily be stuffed into folders with other documents, or in among the pages of Time, or in new folders with whatever proposed executive order was meant to declassify them, or hare-brained legal procedure he meant to bring against the writer... or under the bed with some old NY Posts hat carried stories about him. Or rolled up in the pocket of Russian spy who plans to use them to buy his way out of Russian service? 

FBI needs a lot more search warrants to look for them. 

[J.C.MacSwell]

2 hours ago, Peterkin said:

They could very easily be stuffed into folders with other documents, or in among the pages of Time, or in new folders with whatever proposed executive order was meant to declassify them, or hare-brained legal procedure he meant to bring against the writer... or under the bed with some old NY Posts hat carried stories about him. Or rolled up in the pocket of Russian spy who plans to use them to buy his way out of Russian service? 

FBI needs a lot more search warrants to look for them. 

Have they check in Hunter Biden's briefcase?

[Peterkin]

52 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

Have they check in Hunter Biden's briefcase?

When did he have access?

Alternatively: Who in the Trump entourage had access to Hunter Biden's briefcase?

[J.C.MacSwell]

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

When did he have access?

Alternatively: Who in the Trump entourage had access to Hunter Biden's briefcase?

Inquiring minds want to know?

[toucana]

6 hours ago, TheVat said:

When they say 43 empty classified folders, does that mean to imply that all those documents are missing, and that the 27 documents listed did not match any of those folders?  OTOH If you knew that 27 documents could be matched to specific folders then is the term "empty folder" simply a description of the materials as found, i.e. were they just temporarily removed from folders to be perused and then sloppily never returned to those folders?  How are folders labeled, beyond their classification banner?  As for the possible 16 folders that are orphaned, do we know that their contents were not returned earlier this year - i.e. could they have been returned in a sloppy form, just one big stack minus folderage?  Or were they part of the other huge mass of material (some 1500 documents) that was removed from his office  Sorry, I haven't followed all this in the fine-grained detail that would give me a clearer sense of whether we are looking at destruction or spectacular sloppiness or both.  

 

 

 

It is difficult to say precisely - The most optimistic reading would be that 27 of the empty folders found in Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago match up with unfoldered documents found in the same tranche of boxes unearthed on August 8, and that the contents of the other 16 orphaned folders were co-mingled with the papers in the other 15 boxes previously returned in January. Counter-espionage officers cannot however rely on optimistic assumptions. They have to consider worst case scenarios.

Several  things stand out - firstly, distributions of documents of this type are normally very closely monitored and logged by the agencies who produce them. The copies are numbered, and the individual pages are probably also indexed with micro-printing techniques of the type used to protect banknotes from forgery.

Secondly - anyone who has undergone even the most elementary training in handling classified documents would have been taught that the integrity of a file is of paramount importance. *Nothing* is ever removed or detached from its enclosure, especially not the classification covers - not without the same type of elaborate sign-off and countersigning procedures that would be required to declassify it completely.

Finally there is the matter of classifcation levels - One of the classication covers shown in that photo is marked  TS-SCI  with three further distribution codes HCS-P,  SI,  and TK which indicate that this single document alone was probably sourced from and cross-references —> field reports from spies in foreign countries (HCS-P), NSA signals intercepts (SI), and satellite surveillance photos (TK  - an acronym for the  ‘Talent Keyhole’ program). Documents of this sensitivity simply should not exist outside of a SCIF. The implications of finding an empty folder that once contained them are beyond hair-raising.

[Peterkin]

20 minutes ago, toucana said:

The implications of finding an empty folder that once contained them are beyond hair-raising.

IOW - routine Trumpery

[iNow]

On 8/31/2022 at 7:09 PM, Peterkin said:

The Trump filings for a Special Master were a huge misstep. DOJ has used its response to disclose damning proof of a series of crimes, which it would not otherwise have been able to do

“Barr Dismisses Trump’s Request for a Special Master
 

The former attorney general, who chose not to indict Mr. Trump in the Russia inquiry, said the Justice Department was justified in investigating his handling of government materials.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/us/politics/barr-trump-special-master.html

[Peterkin]

It's always just a matter of time. He stiffs them, he fires them, he throws them under random buses....they dump him....

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/william-barrs-trump-administration-attorney-general/619298/

[J.C.MacSwell]

Maybe Trump simply wasn't aware he wasn't allowed to keep and store top secret information. Maybe he just saved it in case he needed it to extort someone to his advantage or for some other good purpose. It wasn't like he would use it to hurt his vision of America. Maybe he thought people just needed locked up for mishandling emails...

The American people didn't make him President because they thought he was some kind of legal expert.

[Bufofrog]

11 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

Maybe Trump simply wasn't aware he wasn't allowed to keep and store top secret information. Maybe he just saved it in case he needed it to extort someone to his advantage or for some other good purpose. It wasn't like he would use it to hurt his vision of America. Maybe he thought people just needed locked up for mishandling emails...

The American people didn't make him President because they thought he was some kind of legal expert.

Was that a serious post or were you being sarcastic?

Edited September 3, 2022 by Bufofrog

[swansont]

1 hour ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

Maybe Trump simply wasn't aware he wasn't allowed to keep and store top secret information

Ignorance of the law is no excuse (more so for a government official), but he showed he understood these things when he was giving speeches about locking Hillary up for her email server. 

[J.C.MacSwell]

58 minutes ago, Bufofrog said:

Was that a serious post or were you being sarcastic?

Sarcastic.

[Peterkin]

1 hour ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

The American people didn't make him President because they thought he was some kind of legal expert.

The American people didn't make him president at all. The faction that did vote for him certainly also took his legal word whenever he pronounced fraud or criminal activity or election theft against other people and weasled out of his own legal obligations or forgave his convicted felonious cronies. Peculaire, is it not so, their understanding of 'legal' ?

Edited September 3, 2022 by Peterkin

[J.C.MacSwell]

Or at least tongue in cheek.

[TheVat]

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/03/and-consequences-after-an-amazing-series-of-unforced-errors-indictment-is-coming/

A useful summary of Trump's successes at digging himself deeper into his hole.

 

[toucana]

According  to a new Washington Post report, the FBI search team recovered a top secret document containing details of the nuclear weapons systems of an un-named foreign country from Mar-a-Lago during the August 8th search.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/06/donald-trump-mar-a-lago-documents-nuclear-weapons-report

Documents of this type are so highly classified that only the president and a tiny handful of senior advisors are ever read-in on them. They represent the results of many millions of dollars, and years of espionage effort (and lives) invested in obtaiining such closely guarded information.

News of this find has probably been leaked to the WP by DoJ officials  to underline quite how ludicrous Florida judge Aileen Cannon’s recent ruling in favour of appointing a Special Master to review the Mar-a-Lago documents truly is.

Who could possibly be appointed to the role of sorting through boxes to separate Trump’s random bricolage of bed-socks, narcissistic press clippings, and Twitter rants from TS-SCI/SAP nuclear  secrets that only three or four people in government are permitted to read ?

[iNow]

6 hours ago, toucana said:

Who could possibly be appointed to the role of sorting through boxes to separate Trump’s random bricolage of bed-socks, narcissistic press clippings, and Twitter rants from TS-SCI/SAP nuclear  secrets that only three or four people in government are permitted to read ?

It doesn't much matter who. What matters is they will delay. That's the goal here.

If you're losing a court case, the tactic is to slow things down until you can find something to stop your bleeding.

If you're winning a court case, the tactic is to speed things up so you can close it out while you have the upper hand.

Trump and team have used the delay with lawyers tactic with enormous success over the last 4 decades all the way back to his years screwing people over (not paying contracts and contractors, shady real estate deals, bad beef and airline projects, distractions through tabloids, etc.) since his time in New York. 

[toucana]

3 hours ago, iNow said:

Trump and team have used the delay with lawyers tactic with enormous success over the last 4 decades all the way back to his years screwing people over (not paying contracts and contractors, shady real estate deals, bad beef and airline projects, distractions through tabloids, etc.) since his time in New York. 

Agreed, and one of the most pernicious aspects of the delay is that this particular district judge has taken it upon herself to enjoin the entire federal criminal investigation which the document seizure was part of, thereby halting it in its tracks - an action which is wholly unprecedented on the part of a low ranking Article III district judge, and which has been condemned out of hand by a very wide spectrum of senior lawyers, including former AG William Barr.

Allowing the DNI to continue its evaluation of the security compromise in these circumstances  is meaningless, because they need to work in tandem with DoJ criminal investigators in order to do so - if for example they need to establish the exact chain of custody of a top secret document, or if they need to test it for fingerprints, how can they do so without forensic access to the contraband ?

Edited September 7, 2022 by toucana
typo - 'circumstances'

[toucana]

Frank Figliuzzi. a former FBI assistant director of counter-intelligence has pointed out that a subpoena shown in the unredacted version of the MAL search warrant refers to Secret/ FRD documents

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoZlYov0clI

The FRD cryptonym means ‘Formerly Restricted Data’, which is somewhat misleading - the real point is that US intelligence material held on a foreign power’s civilian atomic energy research program can be reclassified as Secret/FRD  if that program is suddenly shifted onto a military footing for the purposes of producing nuclear weapons - because it is now secret military information.

This suggests that the subject of the TS-SCI document in question is an aspiring nuclear power in the process of converting civilian atomic research programs into military ones - Basically that means either Iran or North Korea.

[toucana]

On 8/18/2022 at 9:41 AM, toucana said:

As a topical side-bar on Classified Documents:

Last October, a US naval engineer called Jonathan Toebbe and his wife Diana who worked in Annapolis Maryland were arrested on charges of attempting to sell US naval state secrets to a foreign power. Toebbe who had spent almost a decade working as a submarine propulsion specialist allegedly attempted to sell a large cache of blueprints and technical data for $5 million in cryptocurrency to a foreign agent who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/maryland-man-accused-spying-pleads-not-guilty-will-remain-jail-n1282002

His wife Diana allegedly acted as a lookout while her husband  placed ‘dead drops’ of classified information on data cards hidden in peanut butter sandwiches and bandaid covers.

In a surprise ruling Tuesday, federal judge Groh rejected a plea deal for 12.5 to 17.5 years offered on behalf of Jonathan Toebbe, and 3 years for his wife Diana. The judge rejected the proposed deal because it was too lenient in her view. The couple have now withdrawn their plea deal and will go to trial next year.

The information Toebbe was trying to sell was said to be classified at the Confidential level (not at Secret or Top Secret levels).  Which raises the interesting question of what sentencing guidelines would be considered appropriate by a judge for a person who stole TS-SCI and CNWDI restricted data and offered it for sale ?

 

John Toebbe and his wife were both jailed yesterday. He received a 19 year sentence for attempting to sell US nuclear submarine secrets to a foreign power, but his wife Diana received a 22 year sentence - far longer than the 3 year sentence originally proposed in a plea deal.

https://news.sky.com/story/right-out-of-the-movies-couple-who-tried-to-sell-us-nuclear-submarine-secrets-to-foreign-country-are-jailed-12743447

District Judge Gina Groh who sentenced them in Charleston West Virginia on Wednesday, took strong exception to the fact that Diana Toebbe covertly attempted to write two letters to her husband while both of them were in jail, which urged him to exonerate her. The letters were intercepted by the authorities.

The propulsion system data which the Toebbe couple attmpted to sell was classified only at the lower Confidential level (not at Secret or Top Secret levels). Prosecutors did not disclose which country the accused tried to sell their secrets to, though some sources suggest it was the Braziian navy.

[toucana]

New reporting by the Washington Post says that the DOJ investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago has uncovered fresh evidence of felony obstruction of justice by the FPOTUS.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/02/trump-mar-a-lago-obstruction-classified/

The report mentions that investigators have recovered texts, emails, and attendance logs from a former Trump assistant Molly Michael, which suggest that Trump personally sifted through boxes containing classified documents, deciding which ones to return and which ones to keep - and did so *after* receiving a federal Grand jury subpoena in May 2022 instructing him to return all of them. Trump and his lawyers subsequently issued a mendacious affadavit falsely asserting that all classified documents had been returned.

The DOJ investigation led by Special counsel Jack Smith is also said to be looking into reports that Trump showed classified documents and maps to political donors. If true that could lead to charges of selling classified information under the 1917 Espionage Act.