i spent years in the intelligence community, both working at the office of national intelligence and the white house. and i was surrounded by classified information all the time. i cannot remember a single instance, a single time when either i or those around me working classified information, had dozens and dozens of classified documents laying around in an office, in a situation where they could be packed up and moved to one place. it was pretty standard when you were done reviewing a classified document, we put those documents in what we call burn bags so it could be properly disposed of. so that tells me one of two things had to happen. either as someone was going through these documents over a period of time, they were deliberately putting documents aside so they could be taken at a later date. that would have had to happen. for this number, that would have had to happen over a long period of time. or, and this is really important, at some point prior to january 18, 2020, when we
the authoritative leader of the philippines. and tweeted out a high resolution satellite photo, of what is not to be a classified image of a in iran. he ignored repeated calls from aids to stop using his personal cell phone, despite reporting that foreign spies would listen in from time to time. we first heard report that trump had a habit of ripping up notes in 2018. this is not a one-off. he did this, including ripping up sensitive memos, despite repeated warnings from two chiefs of staff, and the white house counsel. trump did this so often, that staffers put the ripped up papers into burn bags to destroy them. he also, reportedly, had a habit of flushing documents down the toilet. all of those instances took place while trump was president. now, it s entirely different matter to have a former officeholder potentially compromising national security material. given that it s perhaps not really all that surprising that the justice department has ramped up its investigation into dona
that he knowingly violated the law. we have a lot of evidence to suggest he was on notice for a couple of these things. there is two big criminal statutes on point here. we talked about the presidential records act. put that aside. criminal law, there is one on actually the destruction of federal property, we know that is potentially on the table here. again it would require him to knowingly break the law. the second one is the mishandling of classified information. and that one is interesting because as the president, he has the ultimate classification authority. he s the commander in chief. as the former president, he has an obligation to protect classified information. did he know it was classified and destroy it anyway? these are the sort of open questions we have and we need more reporting on. all the reporting does say he was warned by chiefs of staff, two, not to destroy stuff and also by the white house counsel. they have burn bags. there is no reason for him to flush anyth
this conduct of improperly destroying, otherwise destroying record is of course exactly what donald trump accused hillary clinton of doing in the 2016 election. and gallons of ink, and hours, and hours, and hours hundreds of hours thousands of hours. 10,000 of hours of news coverage dedicated to hillary clinton s emails server management. our document retention record the of the state department emails. it s fair to say that it probably helps when the then turn around and start putting records in burn bags to be shredded. and again, these are just a recent headlines. i m just taking you through the last, week okay. there s been 52 weeks of headlines like that. enough for us on this very show. but, at the same time as the facts look worse, and worse, and worse and trump s gil absolutely. his conduct depraved and the republican parties come even more under his way. because again, remember, for a
get. it all started with trump s much reported habit of ripping up documents which is unclear violation of the presidential records act. now the records received by the national archives had to be taped back together, and that s if they arrived at all because some records were so destroyed, completely. put into burn bags, which is a flagrant violation of the act. others were hidden away in the ex presidents private residence in florida, including, it turns, out of those that were marked classified. in including some mock top secret. it s written across the top, it looks a lot like a dozen movies. we now know the national archives us the department of justice to investigate the practices. but we learned about another way that the ex president was destroying the documents. it might answer a lot of the mysteries of the trump and ministration. you see, many of his campaigns, trump it was a show man at