The FBI raid: what was Trump hiding in his basement?

Why did Donald Trump take so many classified and top-secret documents with him when he left the White House? That’s the big question following the FBI’s recent search of Mar-a-Lago, said Timothy L. O’Brien on Bloomberg. What were the former president’s motives in stashing at least 26 boxes of federal property in his Florida home? When he was compelled to turn over one trove of 15 boxes in January, why did he hide an additional 11 boxes in his basement?

The most benign explanation is that he was simply loath to part with mementos. Or perhaps he wanted to conceal embarrassing details. But there is an even darker possibility. Trump is “saddled with about $1bn in debt”; his Trump Organisation is in deep trouble. Did he envision “peddling” national secrets to foreign governments?

I doubt it, said Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in The Wall Street Journal. The most important secrets are “highly technical” and would have meant nothing to Trump; if he did take such papers, it’s likely to have been a mistake as he “chaotically” vacated the White House. He’s far more likely to have been excited about friendly letters from foreign leaders, seeing them as “priceless souvenirs to be framed in a future Trump hotel or presidential shrine”.

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He certainly had a strong “sense of entitlement” to this stuff while he was still in the White House, said Steve Benen on MSNBC. He reportedly referred to classified documents he often took up to his private quarters at night as “mine”, and ignored repeated, emphatic warnings to follow security procedures and the Presidential Records Act. Over advisers’ objections, he kept documents from security briefings, tweeted a sensitive spy-satellite photo of a failed missile launch in Iran, and proudly showed off to visitors his “love letters” from North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Trump has always enjoyed burnishing his own image, said John T. Bennett in Roll Call, but his other abiding obsession is improving his “wealth-to-debt ratio”. So you can’t rule out a more nefarious motive. He reportedly took data on nuclear weapons, and the Republican strategist Steve Schmidt recently mooted the possibility of Trump selling nuclear know-how to the Saudis.

The story has been leaked to the press in a way that creates an impression of dodginess on Trump’s part, said The Wall Street Journal. It’s reminiscent of the Russian collusion probe, which was likewise fed by ominous-sounding leaks, but which ultimately came up empty-handed.

Trump’s critics are rushing their fences, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. They are “setting up impossibly high expectations” of finding a smoking gun of espionage or treason. If Trump is not charged with such crimes, he will claim exoneration. The former president should be held accountable for taking the documents, which may be a felony under a law he himself signed. But let’s “hold back on the guessing games” about his motives, and “let the Justice Department do its work”