HCR, August 11

The August 11 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American puts yesterday’s news in one place.

Like Mueller, She Wrote, Richardon suspects a Saudi connection:

What springs to mind for me is the plan pushed by Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and fundraiser and campaign advisor Tom Barrack, to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. In 2019, whistleblowers from the National Security Council worried that their efforts might have broken the law and that the effort to make the transfer was ongoing. The plan was to enable Saudi leaders to build nuclear power plants, a plan that would have yielded billions of dollars to the investors but would have allowed Saudi Arabia to build nuclear weapons.

If the defeated former president has no objection to unsealing the warrant and inventory for the search of his property (documents which he himself could have made available days ago), I can imagine three possible follow-ups. He might claim that evidence was planted. Or that a coffee-boy put something in a box without his knowledge. A heavily redacted inventory might allow him to claim that the Justice Department in fact has nothing on him. In 1930s movie-speak: “They’re tryin’a frame me, I tell ya!” Or: “You ain’t got nothin’ on me, see?”

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One more possible move: he might claim that he declassified materials in his head, or by telling someone that he had declassified them.


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My last guess seems to have been right. The defeated former president, forty-eight minutes ago on his faux-Twitter: “It was all declassified.”

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As The New York Times points out, even if it were declassified, that wouldn’t matter.