Trump’s life of crime

By Rick Holmes

September 10, 2022

The most important questions about Donald Trump’s latest crime, the theft and hoarding of thousands of pages of secret government documents after leaving office, have yet to be answered and are barely being asked. Why did he take the documents? What did he plan to do with them? Are documents still missing? Has any classified information already fallen into the hands of America’s adversaries?

The Trump media won’t ask these questions, and the mainstream media seem to have lost the plot. In a typical network report this week, on NBC Nightly News, correspondent Peter Alexander felt obliged to note that Trump had denounced the FBI raid as an effort to distract from Biden’s record on inflation – an obvious deflection – when he should have said, “Trump has not denied taking the documents and has not said why he took them.”

But you can bet federal investigators are asking those questions. While we await the details, we may as well speculate. Those of us who have been paying attention have learned a lot about Donald Trump over the last decade, and it’s not hard to guess how his basic tendencies are reflected in his latest misadventure.     

The first thing to remember about Donald Trump is that he’s a career criminal.

Before he ran for office, he cheated on his taxes, his loan applications, his contractors and his wives. He laundered money, conspired with mobsters and assaulted women. In his first campaign, he colluded with the Russians. Once elected, he obstructed justice and extorted the Ukrainians. After losing in 2020, he committed election interference, witness tampering, conspiracy to defraud the United States and incitement to insurrection.

No one should be surprised that he has now added theft of government documents, espionage and more obstruction of justice to the list since leaving office. The guy can’t stop committing crimes. It’s who he is.

The second thing to remember about Donald Trump is that he’s incapable of considering anything or anyone other than himself. He has no values beyond self-interest. He has no capacity for empathy. He is a stranger to truth. He doesn’t understand the Constitution, or the oath of office he took. He has no loyalty to the United States as something distinct from himself, and has shown no loyalty to anyone else.

We know Trump is obsessed with money, and he has never separated his business interests from his public office. While he was running for president (and denying he had any interests in Russia) he was negotiating to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. His enmity toward Ukraine began when his effort to build a golf resort there foundered in the early 2000s. He has business entanglements all over the world, including Scotland, Turkey and the Philippines.

With Trump, everything is a transaction, and that’s where we must start in considering what he was thinking as he snuck classified reports from the Oval Office to the residence upstairs, as he put them in boxes to be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, as he determined which documents should go in the safe, which in his desk drawer, which in the basement closet. He had to be thinking, what could I get for this? Some things he took may have had value as souvenirs. While signing autographs for fans, he’s been known to tell them how much it would be worth on Ebay. It’s not hard to believe he took the stack of empty folders stamped “classified” thinking he could make a nice piece of change if he autographed and sold them. He’s already put White House memorabilia on display in a restaurant in Trump Tower, and he’s got lots of properties to decorate. That’s the most benign explanation I can think of, and it’s not convincing. Who keeps a CIA report on a foreign country’s nuclear weapons as a souvenir?

Trump also knows the value of embarrassing information, from Stormy Daniels’ stories to Hunter Biden’s laptop, whether the information is true or not. He has a network of shady friends known to have trafficked in all kinds of foreign intrigue. Among his own most tightly-held secrets are the private conversations he has had with the likes of Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s MBS. Who knows what deals were dangled, what promises made, what secrets shared?

These are the urgent questions the FBI is investigating, and they have a lot of work ahead of them. They must interview everyone who helped move the documents or who may have come in contact with them at Mar-a-Lago. They must establish a chain of custody for every document, and an inventory of documents still missing. New reports, for instance, indicate Trump took a dozen bankers boxes with him on a private plane from Florida to his New Jersey resort in May, just three days after the National Archives notified him documents were missing. We may see more search warrants before all questions are answered.

The intelligence agencies’ most urgent task is to determine what secrets each document reveals. I expect the intelligence agencies will have to assume every document stored at Mar-a-Lago has been seen by foreign actors; they’ll have to close all operations and withdraw all assets whose identities have been compromised. Make no mistake: Even if none of the documents left the lightly-guarded gates of Trump’s Palm Beach resort, this is a security breach of major proportions.

The final thing to remember about Donald Trump is that no matter how bad things look on the outside, what we don’t know is probably worse. Under this principle, he’s assaulted many more women than the 26 who have come forward. He’s likely not just an admirer of Putin, he’s compromised by him. He didn’t just watch the Jan. 6 insurrection on TV, he organized it. When

Trump is unconvincing when he whines about his innocence, and he often confesses to his crimes, confident he can get away with anything. So when he doesn’t even try to come up with a reason he took those documents to Mar-a-Lago, and resisted government efforts to retrieve them, when he constantly throws roadblocks in the way of those sworn to protect national security, there’s good reason to expect the worst.