NYT: ‘Material From Russia Investigation Went Missing As Trump Left Office’

Isn’t this curious? The New York Times is reporting that “Material from a binder with highly classified information connected to the investigation into Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election disappeared in the final days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, two people familiar with the matter said.”

The disappearance of the material, known as the “Crossfire Hurricane” binder for the name given to the investigation by the F.B.I., vexed national security officials and set off concerns that sensitive information could be inappropriately shared, one of the people said. The material’s disappearance was reported earlier Friday by CNN. The matter was so concerning to officials that the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed about it last year, a U.S. official said.

The story goes on to say that the issue is not so much the substance of the material, but more so the details that it contains which could be used to track secret sources and methods used in intelligence work abroad. Obviously, that would be a wonderful gift from Trump to his favorite dictator, Vladimir Putin. The Times reports that “the publicly available version contains numerous portions that were whited out as classified.” But an unredacted version, in the wrong hands, could be quite a powerful tool, needless to say.

The binder has been a source of recurring attention since January 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office. At the time, Mr. Trump’s aides prepared redactions to some of the material it contained because the president — who was obsessed with the Russia investigation and believed his political enemies had used it to damage his presidency — planned to declassify it and make it public.

Turns out that Mark Meadows had a copy of it. And as you’ll read below, it looks like the spotlight, which has been off of Meadows for a few weeks now, is about to go back on him again.

Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the binder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Mr. Trump still wanted to push information from the binder into the public eye. He suggested, during an April 2021 interview for a book about the Trump presidency, that Mr. Meadows still had the material.

“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”

Mr. Trump did not address a question about whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present for the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have those?” Mr. Trump replied, “Meadows has them.”

“We had pretty much won that battle,” Mr. Trump added, referring to questions about whether his 2016 campaign had worked with Russia. “There was no collusion. There was no nothing. And I think it was maybe past its prime. It would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”

George J. Terwilliger III, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, said the former chief of staff was not responsible for any missing material. “Mark never took any copy of that binder home at any time,” he said.

And Meadows is not the only name that is coming up in connection with classified information. John Solomon, who used to be with The Hill before he found a home in right-wing disinformation media saw material that he should not have seen.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, John Ratcliffe, then Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, declassified around 1,000 pages of intelligence materials related to the Russia investigation, which Trump allies used to try to discredit the inquiry.

In 2022, Mr. Trump made John Solomon, a conservative writer who had been briefly given the binder before it was retrieved, one of his representatives to the National Archives. This allowed Mr. Solomon to see Trump White House records deposited with the agency. He later filed a lawsuit against the government asking a court to order the Justice Department to send the binder to the archives so that he could have access to it.

A court filing he submitted in August described the binder as about 10 inches thick and containing about 2,700 pages. The publicly released version includes fewer than 600 pages, many heavily redacted; it is not clear what accounts for the discrepancy.

The filing said Mr. Solomon had been allowed to thumb through a version of the binder at the White House on Jan. 19, 2021. The contents, it said, included a 2017 F.B.I. report about its interview of Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of unverified claims about Trump-Russia ties; “tasking orders” related to an F.B.I. confidential human source; “lightly-redacted” copies of botched surveillance warrant applications; and text messages between the F.B.I. officials.

Bear in mind, this is very likely the tip of the iceberg. Trump had no business dealing with anything classified. He didn’t observe protocols and things were left on his desk that should not have been outside a SCIF. Trump is oblivious to all this. He saw all of the White House correspondence and anything connected with his term of office as being “souvenirs” that he could collect or give away at will. It was always about him, the “fans” he made of various dictators and the “love letters” that they exchanged. The real world implications of these matters, that loose lips sink ships and that he could get intelligence operatives killed by misplacing a paper here and there never crossed his mind.

And if it had crossed his mind, he wouldn’t have entertained the thought for very long. Trump’s only interest then and now has been himself, not the countless brave men and women who serve in intelligence agencies. No, as you well recall, he was only too happy to take Vladimir Putin’s word over the words of his intelligence agencies back in Helsinki.

I’m willing to bet that none of us would sleep well at night if we had any real idea of how this idiot compromised our country when he was in the White House. And I’m also willing to believe that responsible people, say Mark Milley, probably had the sense to conceal a great deal from Trump so that he wouldn’t make the situation any worse than it already was. Just a speculation and an educated guess, but the reasonable people around Trump, the proverbial adults in the room, knew what a fool he was from the get go.