William Silversmith speculates on the reasoning behind the recent FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago property in Palm Beach, FL, arguing that it may be related to the future political strategy of the Trump political circle.
Introduction
The August 8, 2022 FBI raid of Mar-A-Lago and its aftermath is a confusing story to follow despite the numerous front page headlines, explainers, and discussions that have constantly circulated in its wake. You can read all of them and get no closer to finding out what is actually in the documents. The ruling class is clearly engaged in a fight over something, but the public clearly hasn’t been invited, except as cheering spectators.
At this point it is more useful to ask questions than get answers. Is this fight about something important or is it just political theater? Can the FBI raid a former President? Did Donald Trump commit “espionage”? Do the documents have something to do with nuclear secrets? Is this really about the downplayed right-wing coup attempt of January 6, 2021 where Trump sought to proclaim a Presidential dictatorship?
Neither the Democratic administration in power nor the Republicans are giving much away. The MAGA camp does not deny that Trump had the documents (whatever they contain), instead claiming there was a standing order to declassify them. The liberal camp claims that he failed to use a proper declassification process and mishandled national security secrets.
At first glance, the overall nature of this feud seems rather boring: another distracting fight among the ruling class over document handling that has nothing to do with helping anyone in the midst of a double pandemic,1 jacked up prices, worsening environmental crises, and ginned up tensions with Russia and China. Without public knowledge of the documents’ contents, either side can claim any salacious thing about them to whip the (mainly cable news watching) public into a frenzy ahead of the low turnout midterm elections.
However, there might be something significant about this fight. After all, it is rather extraordinary for a former President to be raided, especially for a Democratic Party so gun-shy that they have so far failed to charge or censure anyone important involved in January 6th, apparently for fear of destabilizing the country. Considering this, it may be possible to predict the broad outlines of what could be in these documents, and how it may be very different from the dominant story we’ve been told.
What follows is merely speculation about a possible scenario. However, this scenario elegantly explains the observable evidence and actions taken (or not taken) by both parties so far. For socialists uninvested in the gimmicks of our democracy for the rich, it is nonetheless helpful to be able to predict what is about to happen in politics. It has been the author’s experience that the contemporary socialist movement has been largely driven by reaction to events whose timing is mostly controlled by state actors (with the exception of natural disasters, such as pandemics). This keeps us moving in ways that are predictable and controllable. One way out of this trap is to be able to predict and plan for important events months or years ahead of time.2 This is only sometimes possible, but this case may be one of them.
Let’s start with what happened. Then, we’ll interpret some of the evidence. Afterward, I’ll present a model and show that this model explains what happened. Lastly, I’ll support this model with quotes from anonymous U.S. officials and a Trump official.
What Happened
On August 8, the FBI raided Trump’s Florida resort Mar-A-Lago and searched the premises. The local FBI field office tipped off the Secret Service they were coming 45 minutes ahead of time and were then let into the property without notifying the Trump family. No Trump family members were located on the premises at the time of the raid.3
When the story first broke, the government (probably the FBI) leaked to the press that the documents pertained to nuclear secrets. As of September 6, the investigation continues to anonymously dribble out the names of the various classification schemes used on the documents and claim some documents are related to foreign nuclear secrets.
Stephen Miller, the man behind some of the Trump administration’s most odious overt acts, such as the Muslim ban and child separations in immigration jails, appeared on Fox News to respond to the raid as a Trump surrogate. Miller railed about how Trump had been repeatedly wronged by the Russiagate hoax, the impeachment proceedings that centered on Trump attempting to get dirt on Joe Biden’s dealings in Ukraine from President Zelensky, the fabricated story about Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan the summer before the election, and Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. He also issued a thinly veiled threat to the institutions involved (probably the FBI, Secret Service, and Department of Justice) saying, “…there will obviously need to be a cleaning house in 2025.”
Trump issued an official statement on his website where he wrote among other things:
It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024… Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before… Hillary Clinton was allowed to delete and acid wash 33,000 E-mails AFTER they were subpoenaed by Congress. Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable. She even took antique furniture, and other items from the White House… The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt must be exposed and stopped.
I will continue to fight for the Great American People!
On August 9, Trump supporters rallied outside of Mar-A-Lago.4 On August 12, news agencies obtained a partially unsealed search warrant pertaining to the August 8th raid. Warrant 22-MJ-8332-BER was issued for a daytime search around noon on August 5th by Duty Magistrate Bruce E. Reinhart in the Southern District of West Palm Beach, Florida and was good for 14 days. It contained two attachments. Attachment A described the places to be searched which were the grounds of Mar-A-Lago not occupied by guests. Attachment B described the property to be seized which were documents with classification markings, communications about defense or classified material, government records created during the Trump administration, evidence of alteration, destruction, or concealment of such records.
Attachment B notes three laws under which these documents are to be seized: 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, 2071, or 1519 which respectively are the Espionage Act, a law against destroying or mutilating original government documents, and a law against altering or destroying records in federal investigations.
Document 17, another partially unsealed but more complete version of the warrant, was entered into the Federal docket on August 11 and obtained by news agencies on August 12. It adds three pages which contain a receipt for the items actually seized. Nearly every item on this list is unintelligible as it consists of line items like “2A – Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” “13 – Box labeled A-18,” or “23A – Miscellaneous Secret Documents,” However, items 1 and 1A can be understood (somewhat) by an ordinary human being: “1 – Executive Grant of Clemency re: Roger Jason Stone, Jr.” and “1A – Info re: President of France”.
On August 30, another document was unsealed by Judge Aileen M. Cannon in the Southern District of Florida West Palm Beach which was slightly more detailed in terms of the quantities of types of items (e.g. documents with and without classification markings, photos, books, and gifts) but revealed no more details about what the documents might contain. DOJ also released a photo of documents (parodied above) classified “SECRET//SCI” and “TOP SECRET//SCI” (SCI means “Sensitive Compartmentalized Information” which means you need to be named or part of a team designated to work with that document) splayed out on the floor with visible text blocked out in the image.
On September 6, investigators anonymously leaked that some documents were labeled “HCS” for “HUMINT Control Systems” or intelligence gathered from human sources. They also anonymously claimed that “…information about a foreign government’s nuclear-defense readiness was found.”
Interpretation of Evidence
The leaked claims about nuclear secrets piqued the author’s interest, as claims like this from American national security organizations are almost always wildly overhyped, and are sometimes even outright lies. During research for a series on nuclear weapons called Insane Before the Sun, I found that the government constantly lied about everything you can think of related to nuclear weapons, including whether or not high energy radiation is dangerous. A good example, which at least somewhat matches this situation, is the 1999 case of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born nuclear scientist working for Los Alamos National Laboratory that was accused of performing espionage for China. The FBI turned this man’s life upside down, keeping him shackled in solitary confinement for 278 days. When the dust settled, there was no evidence. Then-President Bill Clinton said that he was “quite troubled” by the way Dr. Lee had been treated.
The story as it’s been told to the cable news-watching public plays too perfectly into widely held liberal caricatures of Trump for it to be believable without proof. However, making a claim about nuclear secrets does more obviously serve two immediate FBI purposes given that we know they did raid Mar-A-Lago:
- Claims about nuclear weapons are likely to persuade a judge to approve an extraordinary raid on a former President. Even if I think more former Presidents should be raided, it remains empirically extraordinary for the state to do this.
- Classified documents that are thought to be about nuclear secrets are extremely difficult or impossible for the public to obtain via FOIA, court proceedings, or other avenues of government transparency. We won’t know what they contain for years or decades unless someone in power decides to tell us.
The September 6 leaks can simply be dismissed as unverifiable for now. Anonymous accounts of non-specific claims should be regarded as the worst kind of public relations. They could well be accurate, but without names or corroborating evidence, the claims are valueless as anything can be said without consequence. Nonetheless, I suspect the documents do contain some nuclear material since the prosecution will have to justify themselves to the judge. I regard these nuclear documents as the FBI’s crowbar to get inside and grab what they were really after.
The August 12 document is more interesting than the August 30 document, which seems to be mainly an attempt to support claims that some of the documents were classified and embarrass Trump in the media. On its face, this claim appears believable and supported sans any counterclaims of improper handling of evidence. Whether the manner of possession and storage of them is criminal or not, I don’t know and am not much inclined to care.
Even if one accepts the validity of the classification system (the shield behind which the darkest forces in government operate), the government wildly over-classifies so much of its business such that SECRET classification can be applied to completely ordinary and drab information. It is unclear, however, just how interesting SECRET//SCI information might be, since it indicates you can’t just download it off an agency intranet portal as a low level employee with clearance. I am less sure to what extent this over-classification regime applies to TOP SECRET. Of course, if documents are wildly over-classified, it makes it harder for the public or an adversary to figure out where the juicy stuff is, so those aforementioned dark forces are presumably happy with this setup.
The August 12 document is in my opinion, much more remarkable because of the top billing given to those two intelligible items. It’s important to remember that the FBI attorneys making these filings completely control the descriptions of each item and can make it as vivid or opaque as they please. That means these items are significant in some way; they want the public, or at least some part of the public, to receive and understand them.
What do these signals mean? Rawnsley and Suebsang at Rolling Stone seem to think, “1A – Info re: President of France,” might have something to do with Trump bragging that he knew intimate details of Macron’s love life. It could well be something this dumb and salacious; it could also be a distractor or very mundanely that it was paper clipped to or located next to item 1. The most obvious interpretation of item 1A as a signal is that it lets observers know that there might be information in this tranche that is not purely domestic in nature.
Item “1 – Executive Grant of Clemency re: Roger Jason Stone, Jr.” is pretty odd. After all, this document is a public record that can be found online, not something secret. It’s not even clear whether this is a copy or an original of Stone’s Grant of Clemency. Why did the FBI bother to name this document and not simply label it something like “Potential Presidential Record” as they did to “3 – Potential Presidential Record”? Why would the FBI want to call attention to Roger Stone?
Then there is the manner in which these documents became problematic. Trump and his associates removed or otherwise kept the documents at Mar-A-Lago without putting the classified ones through a formal declassification review. I don’t care much about whether they followed procedure here and frankly find the argument that Presidents can declassify at a whim persuasive since they can also classify at a whim.
Personally, I would prefer that at least one guy in the government could shed some light on that black hole without getting derailed by the CIA. In this case, the state bureaucracy is trying to make the argument that they are supreme to the President on the matter of state secrets and that doesn’t quite sit right. It would mean that the President would be at the mercy of the so-called deep state (*cough* *cough*) since they could then extort them with secrets the President couldn’t legally reveal, but that the shady unelected officials that have continuity between administrations could. Perhaps this is not a legal argument based on the text of the national security laws as amended, but the consequences seem important.
Besides the question of whether or not this is a good thing, it seems pretty obvious that Trump officials, after four years in power, know how to work the levers of the declassification process. Additionally, it was reported that initially their interactions with the National Archives were cordial and a lot of leeway was given for them to patch things up. This seems to indicate that they don’t want these particular documents to end up in the public record at this time. Why could that be?
Additionally, former Presidents are granted truly incredible amounts of latitude in all kinds of affairs. Why would the Biden administration green-light the home invasion of a former President? It would have to be something that is very important and threatening to the US empire, the Democratic Party, or both. Given that it would be trivial for Trump officials to make and hide copies of these documents, what would a raid accomplish?
The Model
The author’s belief is that, among other things, these documents are intended to be a 2024 October Surprise containing evidence of corrupt business practices by US officials or members of the Biden family overseas, possibly in Ukraine or China.5 In other words, a ‘Hillary’s Emails Redux,’ as part of a plan to win the Presidency again.
Explaining the Evidence With the Model
Let’s look at how neatly this would explain all the observable evidence.
- Non-Disclosure by Trump: Trump didn’t submit these documents to the public record, because disclosure before the next Presidential election would make them less effective.
- Non-Disclosure by Biden: The FBI used the “nuclear” argument to keep the documents tightly secret. If the information contained in them looks really bad, the Biden administration will want to keep a tight lid on them.
- Roger Stone’s Grant of Clemency: This is a signal to DNC operatives and US officials that either “Roger Stone is a free man and up to his dirty tricks.” or “A Roger Stone-style dirty trick is contained within.” The part about the “President of France” indicates there is foreign intelligence inside using something relatively innocuous sounding. The administration can’t just go around telling everyone on their side what’s in the documents for a variety of reasons, but they need to tell their people to get ready to fight.
- FBI Charging the Espionage Act: There are probably Top Secret foreign intelligence intercepts of some corrupt business deal that may or may not also be part of the usually dirty business of empire.
- The Raid: Given Trump’s people can easily make and hide copies of documents, you have to ask what the point of the raid is since it’s both extremely provocative and doesn’t actually remove his ability to use the documents. The most important reason to do it is to let the administration know what the hell is in the documents so they don’t get blind-sided. The evidence can also be used to embarrass Trump and tie him up in court. It seems pretty far-fetched that they would actually jail a former President. Not only is it legally difficult, the Democratic Party clearly does not have the political will to attempt it. Nonetheless, releasing documents showing corrupt U.S. business dealings in Ukraine, for example, would be potentially damaging enough to both the U.S. empire and the Democratic party that they would green-light a raid. If they are only embarrassing to the Democrats, I doubt it would have happened.
- Trump’s Official Statement on the Raid: Trump complains that Democrats don’t want him to be able to run for President in 2024. He mentions Hillary Clinton’s emails and cleaning up corruption in the U.S. government. He could be slyly implying that the raided documents are relevant to these topics or simply building up his audience’s expectations so that they will be fulfilled when the revelations occur.
- Stephen Miller’s Statement on Fox News on the Raid: Miller complains intensely about Russiagate, Ukraine, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and dirty tricks in the media right before the 2020 election. It sure would be convenient if the forthcoming revelations finally nail Joe Biden on his or his family’s dealings in Ukraine after Trump had to go through an unsuccessful impeachment trial because the Democratic Party was protecting their man and whipping up their base. It would be even more delicious to do so when the Biden administration has so invested the public in the idea of taking the NATO/Ukraine side in a righteous war of defense against Russia.
Trump, famously, would almost certainly hold spite in his heart for years over the most embarrassing thing you can do to a President. He also probably isn’t a fan of the heroic action figure the former comedian Ukrainian President Zelensky has become since the impeachment trial. This model also makes sense in terms of what is already in the public record. We already know that Hunter Biden had a highly paid fake job at energy company Bursima Holdings Ltd. in Ukraine before the war. There are also rumors that he may have had corrupt dealings with a Chinese businessman as well.
Trump and Bannon have seemed particularly fixated on drawing Hunter Biden into the public eye and tarring him as a corrupt weirdo, which is what the laptop scandal has helped develop in dribs and drabs. The DNC aligned tech companies were very protective of Hunter and censored the story in a very public and bizarre way in the lead up to the election. It is possible that Trump and Bannon are trying to create a very negative public image of Hunter and then convincingly show he was involved in a major scandal right before the next election. It is unclear if they will be able to link whatever this is directly to President Biden himself.
After all, this strategy worked for them the last time they were on the outside. During the 2016 election, they proved that the revelation of a major corruption scandal (“Hillary Clinton’s Emails”) could just barely tip the scales to Trump. During the 2020 election, Trump was an incumbent and was defending the throne, so a different strategy was pursued focusing on stealing the election using his control of various government agencies like the Post Office, requiring hard to obtain voter ID cards, or declaring a national emergency if January 6th had been more successful. This strategy failed. In 2024, however, Trump is back on the outside and using the old proven strategy. The goal will be mainly to demotivate Democratic voters, which won’t be that difficult since they are already soft on Joe.
The obvious strategy for Democrats, assuming the contents of the secret documents are true, is to so toxify the discourse around them that blue voters simply don’t believe them when the surprise package drops. They can use the “document mishandling” charges as a way to gin up the blue base to make them believe that “Trump 4 Prison” will soon be a reality and get them to turn out for midterms.
The funny thing is, because Republicans are semi-openly corrupt (Trump is famously very openly corrupt), it is very difficult to get a corruption attack to stick to them politically. Since Democrats pretend to not be corrupt, their base cares about corruption and so an attack can stick and reduce turnout.
So, say you are nodding along so far and accept that the basic premise of this scenario is plausible, but perhaps is thin on evidence. Fortunately, an article by William Arkin at Newsweek comes close to corroborating this scenario with quotes from various U.S. and Trump officials. Arkin uses only anonymous sources, which are not trustworthy. However, because we have independently (and I assure you, I came up with this model before I started writing and found this article) derived this scenario based on publicly available evidence, the anonymous sources can be deemed somewhat more trustworthy.
In “FBI Sought Documents Trump Hoarded for Years, Including about Russiagate,” published on August 17, Arkin states the following:
The two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the situation tell Newsweek that while some of the intelligence documents might have dealt with nuclear weapons, that was not the main focus. “Donald Trump kept documents that interested him,” one of those officials says, “sometimes Iranian or North Korean nukes, sometimes Ukraine or Russia, some foreign leaders.” It wasn’t the subject matter per se that was of interest to Justice as it was fear that Trump might “weaponize” the information, including for personal gain, the official says.
Trump was particularly interested in matters related to the Russia hoax and the wrong-doings of the deep state,” one former Trump official tells Newsweek. “I think he felt, and I agree, that these are facts that the American people need to know.” The official says Trump may have been planning to use them as part of a 2024 run for the presidency. [Emphasis mine]
Conclusion
The Trump document scandal will not fully develop until the next presidential election in 2024. Though Trump’s brand is not quite as strong as it once was, he may be able to use the fact that he has a secret weapon to beat other contenders for the Republican nomination into line in backroom deals. Neither party will be keen to let the public know exactly what this fight is really about until it’s time. This is a battle between factions of the ruling class and you aren’t invited.
I feel it is important for the socialist movement to digest this information because quite a large number of us get very invested in Presidential elections. I am concerned that without knowing what’s coming, many decent people will take up the mantle of anti-fascism, throw themselves into campaigning for the presidential election, and get blindsided. I do not want our efforts to be wasted; we should see what’s coming with both eyes open.
My glum suspicion is that, given both imperial parties are corrupt and the business of empire requires corruption, Trump probably does have quite damning information. We know the U.S. has been messing around in Ukraine since at least the 2014 coup, which occurred while Joe Biden was Vice President. When he reveals his trump card, Trump will be able to present himself, at least in that moment, as an anti-deep state, anti-corruption transparency hero washing away the swamp. Then, if he pulls off a win, the whole scandal will go away when he pardons himself. However, it is always possible that Trump and Bannon have misjudged how much the public will care about the particular documents they’ve obtained. It’s possible that being driven by spite has blinded them. After all, why didn’t they use these documents in 2020?
There are two precedents for Trump to leak intelligence for political effect. Firstly, as revealed during his first impeachment trial, Trump was attempting to get dirt on Joe Biden from Ukraine. This would simply be a continuation of this behavior. Of note, the impeachment proceedings were initiated by a leak from an army man on the National Security Council (originally reported as a CIA Officer). Trump probably has an axe to grind with the military and intelligence community. For example, if he leaked damaging intelligence on Ukraine it would both seriously annoy them and make him look good to everyone except MSNBC viewers and people with Ukraine flags still in their Twitter profile.
Secondly, in 2019, he leaked a highly sophisticated and highly classified satellite photograph of an exploded Iranian rocket on Twitter. This was played off as child-like oafishness in the press. However, one could interpret this as showing his followers that he was willing to give them materials that would anger the deep-state. I wouldn’t discount the possibility that someone in intelligence had angered Trump and sharing the photo on Twitter accomplished the dual purposes of satisfying his followers and getting revenge on bureaucrats telling him what to do.
Of course, Trump positioning himself as an anti-corruption and anti-deep state fighter is pure confection. If Trump was really against the intelligence community and empire he’d be chatting with JFK in the afterlife. One man doesn’t get to undo the life work of a sprawling global complex of spooks, arms dealers, drug dealers, soldiers, Wall Street bankers and lawyers, energy magnates, industrialists, and so on and so forth.
Obviously, such an angelic comparison to JFK is too good for Trump; a man who has dubious connections, networks of armed militant racists and sexists, and pro-business sycophants. In office, Trump made it easier to unleash drones on people. When Trump dropped the MOAB, the largest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan, the former Afghan President Hamid Karzai complained of “an immense atrocity against the Afghan people, against fellow human beings.” Domestically, Trump refused to divest his business holdings, appointed his children and relatives to high level positions, and forced the government to use his hotels for business. He, like his successor, sacrificed at least 500,000 American lives to COVID-19 at the altar of Wall Street. Someone like him could never be a fighter against the very corruption and imperial tools that benefit him.
If you’d take a moment to listen to my advice, I think the most profitable way to invest your time is in cultivating a more disciplined socialist movement independent of the Democratic Party with a political platform enforceable against elected members. This should be done while labor organizing, fighting for improved pandemic protections, tenant organizing, and fighting against racism, xenophobia, and homophobia/transphobia. We should be cultivating relationships with socialists in other countries as a bulwark against imperialism. Ultimately, our federal institutions are so broken and delegitimized that the only way to fix them is to demand a new constitution and a new republic.
The socialist movement is supposed to be a government in waiting. Act like it.
- COVID-19 and Monkeypox are both declared Public Health Emergencies of International Concern by the World Health Organization. Recently, Polio has been popping up too with New York State declaring an emergency. Should I have written three pandemics?
- The more important and controllable way is to have an independent party, a democratically decided political platform, a constituency, and a coherent strategy but I digress.
- Via ABC News.
- Via WPBF 25 News.
- “October surprise” is a U.S. political jargon term that refers to an unexpected news event that may influence the outcome of an upcoming November election.