By Stephen Macaulay
For about $100 you can buy a computer scanner.
In a matter of moments even documents that are labeled “top secret/sensitive compartmented information” could be deposited on a hard drive for quick email distribution or stuck on a thumb drive.
Donald Trump, not a man known for his dynamic reading capability (or even for, well, reading), took 26 boxes of documents to Mar-a-Lago, which is described on its website as “the only private club world-wide to attain the prestigious 6-Star Diamond Award from the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences.”
The what?
Well, according to a May 2016 AP story, “when it comes to Trump, the academy isn't an independent observer.
“The organization is run by Joseph Cinque, a longtime Trump acquaintance who goes by the nickname "Joey No Socks" and has a felony conviction for possessing stolen property.”
And it goes on to report:
“As recently as last May, Trump himself was listed on the group's website as its "ambassador extraordinaire," and he appeared in a 2009 tribute video to Cinque in which he said: "There's nobody like him. He's a special guy."
“But Trump told The Associated Press on Friday that he doesn't know Cinque well and was unaware of Cinque's criminal conviction.”
All of this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Now anyone who has moved house, even if it isn’t from one of the most legendary houses in the world to a prestigious 6-Star Diamond manse, knows that when you pack boxes often things go awry. Somehow no matter how carefully you mark things, there is a nearly metaphysical impossibility that all of the forks disappear. And sometimes upon unpacking there is the discovery of something that was long thought to be lost.
So let’s give Trump a benefit of a doubt. Certainly something in that move—a move that he still argues shouldn’t have occurred because the election was stolen, rigged or otherwise stacked against him (and let’s not forget, he, too, is a special guy)—probably got misplaced. After all, he had to be in a bit of a rush.
Maybe it just so happened that some documents that are top, top secret just happened to get snagged on a paper clip on the stack of love letters (his adjective) to Kim Jong-un and was shipped to his swank (six diamonds!) digs purely by accident.
But then there is that little matter of him taking things he had no legal right to. Boxes and boxes.
On Meet the Press August 14, Andrea Mitchell put it to presidential historian Michael Beschloss that Trump tweeted, “President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots.”
Beschloss responded, surprisingly, “Well, President Trump is absolutely right. Barack Obama has tens of millions of documents. . .” YIKES! but the shoe drops. . .”and they are in a National Archives installation, Hoffman Estates, Illinois, under armed guard with heavy surveillance, using the procedures that are supposed to be used for a former president. We have never in history seen a former president take ultra-classified documents, stick them in his basement, loosely watched by government standards, and with the shadow of we still don't know what his motive was.”
Well, it is the basement of that venue that won that coveted award.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Trump Tower got one of those plaques, too.
But I wonder about that scanner.