I saw another headline about this this morning and it made me wonder: what did trump plan to DO with the classified material that he borrowed stole from the White House?
Is it too far-fetched to think that he planned to capitalize on it ($$) it somewhere down the road? I know that there is no bottom-limit to how low he and his cronies will go… but is even he capable of selling stuff to Putin* or his Korean BFF or holding the material hostage and asking Congress to pay some kind of ransom? Not realizing that the gummint can just go and seize the stuff (like they did).
Surely, whoever packed up those boxes (and it surely wasn’t trump) knew some of what was in there? I mean, WTF?
* I’m sure Putin already knows anything and everything that Donald would want to sell/give him.
It may have been simply to deprive Biden of having the information more than to do with possessing the information. Withholding critical classified information from a new president trying to deal with sensitive situations is totally in Trump’s Wheelhouse of Evil.
I’m still not convinced that Trump ever plans anything. He gives a speech announcing that he’ll replace Obamacare, or have an infrastructure week, or dozens of other things he said he’d do. He says these things in the moment because he knows they’ll get him headlines and they’re the kinds of things that presidents talk about. It doesn’t matter to him if anything gets passed or anything gets built, and he knows that if anyone ever presses him on the subject he’ll have moved on to something else presidential sounding.
I think that when he was packing up to leave the White House he said “take everything you can.” He doesn’t plan, he wants, and acts.
…
The financial terms of the proposed deal are unclear, but the events would undoubtedly provide revenue for Trump through the Saudis, who are making a fierce bid to recruit PGA Tour players and launch a series of golf tournaments.
As president, Trump frequently defended the Saudi government even as it committed a wide range of human right abuses, including the 2018 murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment and execution of gay citizens. Trump’s first overseas trip as president was to Saudi Arabia, and he regularly praised the country’s wealth and power, even as some advisers pushed him to take a tougher line on the country.
Such a deal would also provide a measure of revenge for Trump against the PGA Tour, an organization that he courted for years but that later enraged him when politics came between them. While Trump campaigned in the summer of 2016, the PGA Tour announced it was yanking its elite World Golf Championship tournament from Doral and moving it to Mexico City. Trump also lost the PGA championship from his course in New Jersey last year, as the organization pulled its event days after the Jan. 6 insurrection by a pro-Trump mob at the U.S. Capitol.
…
Making money and shooting the finger at the PGA? Win-win!
I would note for information’s sake that there are usually three levels of Classification: “Confidential”, which is the lowest level, “Secret”, which is where most Classified information is, and “Top Secret”, which merits the highest level of protection and needs special clearances to access. Most any Government worker requiring it can get “Secret” clearance, but very few will get “Top Secret” clearance. Of course the President is cleared to read all levels.
So I wonder exactly what clearance level of documents he and his folks took; Confidential is serious but not all that major; Secret is a big concern and Top Secret could (and should) lead to serious repercussions and perhaps court.
Reporting by the Washington Post states that at least some of the documents were explicitly designated Top Secret. I knew I recalled reading this somewhere and was able to dig up a cite.
When asked on theClay Travis and Buck Sexton Show if he will be running for president in 2024, Trump responded that he couldn’t really answer due to campaign finance laws…
Is it possible (or even legal) for the PGA to simply announce that any player who goes to a Saudi Trump tournament will be ineligible to play on a PGA event for that year?
Probably both, from my admittedly cursory familiarity with the PGA. The problem is that they lack the stones to do it. If not, I’m sure an individual course can ban someone.
