Trump haters hide you eyes. You will be offended by this post. As I have said before, Donald Trump is not a fellow with whom I would like to break bread, but I am an ardent supporter of the rule of law and I have to tell you that I do not like this Trump document situation. First, for those who may not know, for five years I was a very senior member of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterintelligence Center and before that I held the counterintelligence brief in all my overseas stations, save one. I have caught double agents, American spies, fabricators, embellishers and all their ilk who seek to spy against or misdirect the U.S. Government for one reason or another.
I no longer have direct access to such matters but one does not lose the skills developed over three decades nor does one lose the nose to smell a bad case. But with this case you do not have to have a well developed nose, for this affair smells as bad as a water moccasin three days dead. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered that smell but if you had you would never forget it. First, water moccasins smell bad to begin with, and when they’re dead they smell even worse.
Using only information available to the general public here’s why this affair makes my Spy-dee sense tingle. The Archives sent personnel to Mar-a-Lago in June. They had unfettered access to whatever they wanted. When they left they did not take away the documents in question, rather they informed the house manager that a lock should be installed on the cabinet in which were stored the documents they didn’t take. Then the temporary archivist informs the Department of Justice she believes certain classified documents remain at Mar-a-Lago and we have the first ever raid on a former president’s private residence. Why didn’t the archivists take these documents when they visited Mar-a-Lago in June? If they had not seen these documents how would they have known to tell the DoJ what they were? If they left them there, under instruction to return them later, why? If left for three months, why not six, or twelve. Doesn’t make sense.
Then there’s the story that Trump shared the documents with a foreign government. That’s purely a rumor for you can track the source back to anonymous officials. I never believe anonymous officials, just as I never believed anonymous sources giving us actionable intelligence. There’s always an ulterior motive. It was these very same anonymous sources and an ardently anti-trump media who claimed, in 2016, Trump was an agent of Russia. The rumor of espionage was easy to start for the storage of classified material laws lie within the same statute which is known as the espionage statue. So, someone hears Trump is being investigated under the Espionage Act thus, he must be guilty of espionage. These are the same sections of the law under which General David Petraeus was investigated and under which Hillary Clinton should have been investigated. No one shouted or manufactured a story of espionage for either to them, but the media is quick to jump on the statute’s name to indict Trump for espionage. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Should I be allowed to conduct an investigation into this affair and I were to make use of one of a number of polygraph interviewers with whom I have worked, I think you would see some serious crawfishing on the part of the archivists and FBI search team. We would almost assuredly learn there are political operatives behind the “Espionage” claim, just like the political operatives who were behind the Steele Dossier and the claim that Trump was a Putin agent. To a non-partisan professional counterintelligence officer like me, the whole thing looks like a set-up. For those of you who suffer from Trump derangement syndrome I can only say that when you let your emotions rule your head you’re in for a big tumble. For those of you who love Trump, for whatever reason, why were the documents there in the first place? We need an independent and non-partisan investigation of both sides of this matter.
Again, it smells like a water moccasin three days dead.