The Morning Dispatch: Trump Team Likely Sought to Conceal Classified Documents From Investigators, DOJ Says

Happy Wednesday! About half of today’s Quick Hits are drone-related, and they’re a lot less disconcerting to read if you imagine them referring to the little remote-control toy kind of drones and not the ominous-looking war machines that can launch missiles.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Taiwanese soldiers fired flares and warning shots at a drone—reportedly Chinese—that flew near a group of islands off the coast of Taiwan on Tuesday. The drone began flying back to the Chinese mainland after the shots were fired, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry. Earlier in the day, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said she had ordered Taiwan’s military to take “strong countermeasures” against Chinese provocations and harassment. “We will not give China the pretext to create conflict,” she said. “We will not provoke disputes and we will be restrained, yet that does not mean we will not counteract.”

• The U.S. 5th Fleet announced yesterday that U.S. naval forces prevented an attempt by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to capture an American drone in the Persian Gulf on Monday. The USS Thunderbolt and a combat helicopter reportedly responded to an IRGC ship towing the unmanned surface vessel, leading the IRGC ship to disconnect its line and depart the area. Iranian state media dismissed the Navy’s account as a “false, Hollywood narrative,” claiming the IRGC ship towed the drone “to ensure the safety of the shipping route.”

• The first batch of what U.S. officials expect will be “hundreds” of Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles has arrived in Russia, Pentagon spokesman Todd Breasseale told Politico on Tuesday. The Mohajer-6 and Shahed-series drones can be used to conduct strikes, and Russia is expected to deploy them on the battlefield in Ukraine.

• U.S. officials confirmed to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that the drones that attacked a U.S. military base in Syria earlier this month were launched from an area of Iraq controlled by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia. The Biden administration retaliated for the attack a week later by striking facilities in northern Syria used by militant groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

• Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced Tuesday that Poland will more than double its military budget next year in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in line with its pledge to boost defense spending to 3 percent of its GDP. “We have the ability to significantly bolster our army and to recruit new soldiers,” Morawiecki said, hinting at plans to add 20,000 new troops in 2023. 

• The Education Department announced Tuesday it will automatically discharge approximately $1.5 billion in federal student loans for 79,000 borrowers who attended Westwood College—a now-defunct for-profit chain with campuses in five states—between 2002 and 2015. As it had with Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute in recent months, the Education Department found Westwood engaged in “widespread misrepresentations” about both the value of its credentials and its graduates’ employment prospects.

• The Department of Health and Human Services on Monday signed an $11 billion deal with Grand River Aseptic Manufacturing in Michigan to expedite the domestic production of JYNNEOS, a vaccine made by Bavarian Nordic that is approved to prevent smallpox and monkeypox. The White House’s National Monkeypox Response team announced yesterday the Biden administration will send extra vaccine doses to a handful of upcoming gay pride events, given the virus is primarily spreading among men who have sex with men. The Texas Department of Health confirmed Tuesday that a “severely immunocompromised” adult diagnosed with monkeypox died recently—the first known U.S. fatality tied to the virus—but it’s unclear what role monkeypox played in the individual’s death.

• The U.S. labor market remained extremely tight last month, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting Wednesday there were 11.2 million job openings in the United States at the end of July—near record highs and up slightly from 11 million at the end of June. The quits rate—the percentage of workers who quit their job during the month—ticked down slightly from 2.8 percent to 2.7 percent, and the number of layoffs and discharges held steady at 1.4 million.

• Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed new rules yesterday on political appointees at the Justice Department, prohibiting them from attending partisan political events in both their official and personal capacities. Non-career DOJ employees had previously been allowed to attend such events in their personal capacities if their participation was passive and they obtained approval in advance, but Garland determined additional restrictions were necessary to “avoid any appearance of political influence on the Department’s activities.”

• Mikhail Gorbachev—the former leader of the Soviet Union who sought to modernize and liberalize Soviet society before overseeing the empire’s dissolution in 1991—died on Tuesday at the age of 91, according to Russian state media.

The Justice Department Brings Receipts

Donald Trump has a new lawyer, and, like most lawyers who agree to work for Donald Trump, he has his work cut out for him.

As first reported by NBC News on Tuesday, Chris Kise has joined the former president’s legal team, representing Trump in the criminal case related to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month. The former solicitor general of Florida, Kise is a close ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott—and he’s won four of the cases he’s argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. But his latest undertaking will likely prove the most challenging litigation of his career, in addition to the highest profile.

“Trump has a long history of saying things that are good PR, but that are bad law and bad litigation strategy,” Ken White—a criminal defense attorney and host of the Serious Trouble podcast—told The Dispatch. “Trying to keep things straight and maintain a coherent strategy and a consistent position in court is very difficult when your client is out there on social [media] saying something opposite.” Trump posted or reposted nearly 80 things on Truth Social yesterday alone, and at least 13 of those posts were related to the Mar-a-Lago investigation. (Declan received hazard pay for agreeing to sift through all that.)

Odds are Trump will have cranked out a few more “truths” by the time you’re reading this. Around 11:30 p.m. ET last night—30 minutes before the deadline imposed by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon—the Justice Department released its most detailed and revealing filing related to the investigation thus far. Over the course of 36 devastating (and unredacted) pages—plus 18 pages of attachments and exhibits—the Justice Department’s counterintelligence chief, Jay Bratt, essentially laid out in full the agency’s justification for the Mar-a-Lago search: It allegedly had evidence Trump and his team concealed from the government just how many classified and top secret documents were being held at the resort.

According to the Justice Department’s version of events, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was in communication with Trump and his team throughout 2021 about what it believed to be missing presidential records. The former president ultimately procured 15 boxes of material from Mar-a-Lago in January 2022, and, when NARA realized the boxes contained highly classified material—“unfoldered, intermixed with other records”—it notified the Department of Justice. Upon reviewing the cache of documents, the FBI found 184 tagged with classification markings: 67 labeled “confidential,” 92 labeled “secret,” and 25 labeled “top secret.” The agency worried that was just the tip of the iceberg, and soon its investigation dug up evidence that dozens of additional boxes remained at Mar-a-Lago, and that those boxes were also likely to contain classified information.

The Justice Department obtained a grand jury subpoena requesting “any and all documents or writings” Trump still had that bore classification markings, and in early June, three FBI agents and a DOJ attorney traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with a lawyer for the former president—as well as a “custodian of records” for Trump’s post-presidential office—and collect 38 additional classified documents. Neither Trump representative mentioned anything about Trump having declassified the material at Mar-a-Lago, nor did they assert any claim of executive privilege. At the conclusion of the meeting, the custodian provided a signed letter certifying that, to the best of their knowledge, a “diligent search” had been conducted to locate “any and all documents” that met the subpoena’s criteria.

But within days, the FBI had uncovered “multiple sources of evidence” indicating that was not true. Not only were there more classified documents remaining at Mar-a-Lago, the Justice Department now believed Trump’s team likely “concealed” government records, removing them from the storage room on the premises in an effort to “obstruct the government’s investigation.” It was then that federal prosecutors applied for a search and seizure warrant, which FBI agents executed on August 8.

Last night’s filing confirmed, for the first time, certain details of what they found. Agents collected 33 items of evidence in total, including dozens of boxes of material and three classified documents they found in a desk drawer in Trump’s office. Thirteen boxes contained more than 100 unique classified documents ranging from “confidential” to “top secret,” and some of the material’s distribution was so limited that even FBI counterintelligence personnel reviewing it required additional clearances before they were permitted to review it.

“That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter,” Bratt wrote.

The Justice Department’s filing came in response to a motion from Trump’s legal team last week requesting Cannon—the aforementioned District Court judge—appoint an independent third party to comb through the documents seized by the FBI and pull out any covered by executive privilege or attorney-client privilege before being turned over to federal investigators. Such third parties, or “special masters,” are relatively common in cases involving white-collar crime, particularly when an attorney is being searched.

“The motion for a special master is itself not remarkable. What’s remarkable is [Trump’s legal team] waited two weeks to file it,” White said, noting the high-profile nature of the case and the relatively small number of documents in play. “You would expect something like this to be in court the same day. After two weeks, the likely result was going to be that everything had already been done.”

Sure enough, it appears that’s exactly what happened. After Cannon issued a preliminary order over the weekend signaling a willingness to grant Trump’s request, the Justice Department released a filing on Monday indicating the issue was likely moot, as the agency’s Privilege Review Team had already gone through the material and identified a “limited set of materials” that potentially contained information protected by attorney-client privilege. Bratt further encouraged Cannon to reject Trump’s motion in last night’s filing, noting the government’s investigative team had already reviewed all materials not sifted out by the Privilege Review Team.

“Furthermore, appointment of a special master would impede the government’s ongoing criminal investigation,” Bratt added. And “if the special master were tasked with reviewing classified documents, [it] would impede the Intelligence Community from conducting its ongoing review of the national security risk that improper storage of these highly sensitive materials may have caused.”

Trump’s legal team has until 8 p.m. ET tonight to file a response, and Cannon—a Trump nominee—is scheduled to hold a hearing on the matter Thursday.

Why This Matters

We get it, it’s easy to allow your eyes to glaze over when reading about government document retention practices. But as Republicans correctly acknowledged when Hillary Clinton’s private email server was in the news and Democrats are correctly acknowledging now, the security of classified information really is of the utmost importance. We caught up with Klon Kitchen—a former senior member of the intelligence community and the author of The Current here at The Dispatch—to better understand why. The conversation below is lightly edited for conciseness and clarity.

TMD: In addition to the Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret classifications highlighted by the Justice Department, the partially redacted affidavit released last Friday noted some of the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago were marked as “HCS” and “SCI.” What do those labels mean?

Kitchen: HCS is human intelligence reporting, and it’s a marking that both the CIA and Defense Department human intelligence intel controllers require on any information that contains human source reporting. And by having HCS in it, that reporting is in more restricted distribution channels than even normal top secret information. 

And then SCI — all SCI is Top Secret, but not all top secret is SCI. Information that is top secret almost always includes SCI. The presence of SCI or HCS is one of the things that takes a piece of intelligence across the goal line from Secret to Top Secret. HCS and SCI are very common in top secret documents, but anything that has that information is very, very sensitive. It moves the material into a category of information that is truly in need of protection, and has a whole host of handling instructions that don’t include taking it into your basement and just allowing it to just be stored in a box.

TMD: What are the real-world stakes of documents like the ones that were allegedly stored at Mar-a-Lago falling into the wrong hands?

Kitchen: On the lower end of things, there’s the risk of that source or method of information drying up, and we just lose it. Because this is the president’s information, we give him very particular stuff. We don’t bother him with all the things that guys like me used to have to read all day. He gets stuff that really matters, where there’s a decision to be made, and where a piece of intelligence meaningfully changes the situation. Anyone who sees this material could theoretically be able to understand a situation, and how we know about it, and what we’re thinking about it, and what we’re doing about it, better than 95 percent of the entire intelligence community.

You have to think about why we’re giving the president a piece of information in the first place. We are trying to inform him of something that is truly important, so that he is not caught unaware, or so that he can make a decision about an opportunity, or about defending against a risk. And we have to give information to the president in such a way as to where he understands why we’re making a conclusion that we’re making, and how reliable or trustworthy that assessment is. 

If we say, for example, “Hey, Putin is going to invade Ukraine on Thursday at 3 p.m.,” the president will rightly ask, “Well, how do you know that? Why do you believe that just because this guy says so?” “Oh, well actually sir, he’s the Deputy Minister of Defense, and he’s been on our payroll for three years.”

That kind of stuff gets captured, and if that’s found out, even if we don’t say “it was the Deputy Minister of Defense,” Putin knows, “Okay, there were six people who knew the answer to this, I’ll just kill them all to make sure.” It’s that kind of thing.

TMD: Can you shed a little light on just how seriously the people who have access to this kind of information take document retention and security? How clear are the repercussions for any lapses?

Kitchen: It is drilled into you that mishandling of classified documents is one of the few ways that you can get immediately fired from the intelligence community. 

Occasionally, it happens where someone will take a piece of classified information to a briefing, say, at the White House. They have it in a lock bag, and then they put the lock bag in the car, and they leave, and they go to work, and they turn everything in. And then they get in their car and drive home and they look in the back seat and realize, “Oh, crap, one of the classified maps fell out.” There’s no “Well, okay, I’ll take it inside and put it under my mattress and wait for tomorrow morning.” No! You have to immediately call your security officer, let them know that you have the information, and then you immediately take it back, and then the SSO meets you, and you have to go through this whole process of repatriating that information back into the SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility].

The stuff I had to go through just to be able to read this material: Background investigation, drug test, full-scope polygraph over multiple days, my friends and families and neighbors being interviewed, I would occasionally be followed by our counterintelligence personnel, they would monitor my finances, they would monitor my online activity, I would have to report on any closing continuing foreign contacts, I had to pre-approve any foreign travel that I was doing. And that was just to be able to read this stuff—in a SCIF! 

So the idea of bringing this stuff home, I mean, I can’t tell you how—it just doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s just so far out there.

Worth Your Time

• Navy SEALs are supposed to be the best of the best—and a brutal multi-week selection course is supposed to ensure they are. But punishing standards and lackluster medical care have created a culture among recruits that says “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying,” Dave Philipps reports for the New York Times. “Sailors who enter the program bolstered by steroids and hormones can push harder, recover faster and probably beat out the sailors who are trying to become SEALs while clean, said one senior SEAL leader with multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Philipps writes. “The inevitable effect, he said, is that a course designed to select the very best will end up selecting only the very best cheaters, and steadily fill the SEAL teams with war fighters who view rules as optional. ‘What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?’ said the leader. ‘A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an ethical decision?’”

Something Wholesome

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Toeing the Company Line

• For more on the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search, tune into today’s episode of The Remnant with Jonah and … Sarah! Do Trump’s claims of executive privilege hold up? How does Trump’s behavior compare to Hillary Clinton and her private email server? And what’s with Sarah’s affection for spiders?

• David took a look at Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Tuesday’s French Press (🔒). “I’m now more optimistic about the chances of meaningful Ukrainian success,” he writes. “The tide of war seems to be turning again, and this time Russia’s fortunes are on the wane.”

• In Tuesday’s Uphill, Haley and Audrey provide an update on internal dynamics within the House Republican Conference ahead of the midterms. “One House GOP lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity said they are ‘very concerned about the influence of certain members over the party and its leadership and the direction of our conference after November,’” Haley and Audrey report. “The lawmaker doesn’t expect much from [Minority Leader Kevin] McCarthy: ‘I don’t bother taking my complaints to him any more because I know it won’t matter.’”

• This week’s edition of The Sweep (🔒) dives into Blake Masters, the politics of abortion, and how Republicans are adapting to the post-Roe landscape. “One strategy is to simply hammer other issues where polling better favors the GOP: Focus on the economy and Biden’s job performance, and hope that keeps voters energized enough to win,” they write. “The other path is to tackle abortion politics head-on in an attempt to shift that public opinion directly.”

• On Tuesday’s episode of Dispatch Live, David was joined by Manhattan Institute economist Brian Riedl to discuss the Biden administration’s student loan cancellation plan and its costs. Dispatch members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here.

Let Us Know

Based on the additional information that’s been made public in recent days, do you think the Justice Department made the right call executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago? Has your opinion on the matter shifted since the search was originally carried out?