Sensitive Government Documents are Piled in a Tacky Golf Resort Bathroom
In 2016 the U.S.A. elected Donald Trump,
a serially bankrupt casino owner and former game show host,
as its President.
On 8 June 2023 the U.S. Department of Justice issued a grand jury indictment
charging Trump with 37 felony counts relating to his mishandling of
classified documents after his presidency.
31 of the counts fall under the Espionage Act,
as the mishandled documents included details of U.S. intelligence analysis
and military planning.
The other six counts have to do with making false statements to the Government
and to law enforcement, and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Trump was arraigned in court on 13 June.
The indictment includes details from several witnesses,
pictures taken by the FBI while recovering documents from Trump's golf palaces,
and recordings of Trump bragging while showing some of the documents to
people without security clearances.
Inappropriate Sensitive Document Storage
The image most relevant to this site is the below one,
showing what appears to be 38 large cardboard boxes filled with documents,
stacked in an incredibly tacky bathroom at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort.
There's a chandelier over the toilet!
Gaudy gilt mirror frames!
Another chandelier-like light fixture on the wall above the toilet!
But the worst part are those boxes full of secrets.
Trump has the bad decorating taste of a tin-pot dictator.
Above is one of the bathrooms,
below are piles of sensitive documents
on a stage in a gaudily decorated ballroom.
Here's another hoard in a storage room.
Notice how the boxes are stacked on wooden pallets,
with the stacks of white-and-blue boxes tapering down somewhat
at the far end, beyond which are some larger brown cardboard boxes.
The indictment
Analysis of the indictment
But Wait, It Gets Much Worse
The below picture is taken from the other end of that same storage room.
The picture above was taken by someone leaning against the wall
at the far end from the below vantage point.
Notice that the left-hand wall in the below picture
is the right-hand wall viewed in the opposite direction above.
Now notice the white object in the middle of the right-hand wall above,
about half-way down the wall between stacks of brown cardboard boxes.
It appears to be a photocopier!
Much Worse, Indeed
The below picture was taken during the document recovery in August 2022,
when the FBI recovered more than 13,300 documents
that had been illegally removed from the White House,
over 300 of which were marked as classified.
This picture shows several documents marked as
"SECRET//SCI"
and
"TOP SECRET//SCI",
all lying on tacky ballroom carpeting.
"SECRET" is defined as material that would cause "serious damage"
to national security if it became publicly available.
"TOP SECRET" would cause "exceptionally grave damage".
"SCI", visible on all the cover sheets here,
means Sensitive Compartmented Information.
It's a category of information concerning or derived from
sensitive intelligence sources, methods, or analytical processes.
At the moment Trump left office, he lost the ability to view,
let alone abscond with, classified documents.
But he took hundreds to his golf resorts in New Jersey and Florida,
and possibly to other locations.
During a group discussion that was being openly recorded,
he bragged about having sensitive documents and shared them with the group.
Trump was very loose with sensitive information while in office.
The rap performer Kid Rock
said in an interview
that Trump had shown him classified maps and asked his advice on what
"we should do about North Korea" while still in office.
Look at the closest document, with a "SECRET//SCI" cover sheet
and a paper clip near its top left corner holding the document
itself with the cover sheet.
The FBI agents documenting this took care to lay a ruled square
next to this document.
You might wonder why, as these are U.S. Government documents
and therefore are surely on 8.5×11 inch paper.
But notice the cover sheet's white border,
something you also see on the "TOP SECRET//SCI" documents.
I think they were inviting us to consider this item more carefully.
Official U.S. Government cover sheets
The thing is, the
SECRET and TOP SECRET cover sheets
are U.S. Government Standard Form 704 and 703, respectively.
The GPO or Government Printing Office produces these.
And the colored border "bleeds to the edge" as printers say.
There is no white border.
However, most office and home printers along with all photocopiers
can't print all the way to the edge.
There will always be a white border around a photocopied document.
Apparently Trump had his henchmen making color photocopies
of sensitive documents.
Anyone who has had to deal with classified data should be cringing
extra hard now.
Who knows how many visitors to Trump's golf resorts have left
with copies of sensitive documents?
How many have been sent to Vladimir Putin, Muhammad bin Salman,
Kim Jong Un, and other authoritarian rulers admired by Trump?
Also consider that the investigators very likely left even more sensitive
documents out of the indictment, to avoid their exposure in the trail,
and so the damage done is probably much worse than we will ever learn.
Not to mention the psychological trauma suffered by foreign agents
who had to sit in that Dictator Kitsch bathroom
under the toilet chandelier
while browsing through America's secrets.
Next article:
The Horrible Death of Edmund Ironside
