Donald Trump has at least 19 lawyers defending him in at least eight investigations. accordingTo Politico. If these revelations continue to mount, this number could double in as little as it takes for a box of rabbits to breed. Finding that help won’t be easy, either; this is an area of the law that isn’t lousy with specific experts, and the ones available have this thing about getting paid.
A new development in the saga would also send most lawyers running.
“A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month,” reports The Washington Post. “Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs.”
If you’re looking for high dudgeon here regarding the holy sanctity of top-secret documents, prepare for disappointment. Yes, there are secrets, and some of those secrets protect people, I get it, of course… but an awful lot of information has been called “secret” by the government only to keep you from finding out about it, and far too many of us believe we live in a Tom Clancy novel. Abu Ghraib was once a secret, as were the “Pentagon Papers,” and those things existed only because someone believed they could keep a lid on it all. Is the country better off for these efforts?
“A fortress mindset feeds the U.S. government’s huge ‘defense’ budget — which is higher than the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined — while the Pentagon maintains about 750 military bases overseas,” author and activist Norman Solomon writes for Truthout. “But victimology is among Washington’s official poses, in sync with a core belief that the United States is at the center of the world’s importance and must therefore police the world to the best of its capacity.”
Secrets are fundamentally important. This is why they are so carefully guarded and why the Trump scandal has caused so much panic. Secrets are made portentous by their mystery, and those who are allowed to see them are made very Important, with a capital “I.” I strongly suspect that feeling of Importance is why Trump had this stuff lying around in the first place.
Understand: Donald Trump is the most highly classified person on the planet. He is the perfect example of a compromised individual. He got all that stuff because the country went mad and made him president. Presidents are automatically granted top-flight clearance due to their electoral victories.
But he is Donald Trump, the man who desperately wants to hide a small part of himself. Even being president of the United States wasn’t enough to assuage his insecurity, so, perhaps, he surrounded himself with boxes of secret documents that made him feel whatever passes for powerful in his shriveled little soul.
Who knows which country those nuke documents were describing? Israel? China? Russia? Is it really relevant at this point? We live in a delicate web of perils, mostly leftover from the Cold War, thanks to a million profit-driven war decision made over the past 80 years. It’s not our fault, but it is all our problem.
