Mark Meadows: The Burning Man

 

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe." - CNN

“I would let you look at them if you wanted. It’s a treasure trove.” -Donald Trump

What you see in the lead image are a pair of six inch binders one can get on Amazon.com. We can all imagine how large six inches is. A half a foot-wide binder can, obviously, accommodate a lot of pages. The manufacturer states on Amazon, in fact, that each six inch binder can hold 1225 pages. Combine them and, obviously, you get a foot and nearly 2500 pages.

     That's just two inches over that of the Russian binder that went missing from the White House in the final hours of Trump's administration. And that 10 inch binder was described as containing 2700 pages. There are very few people on earth who know the contents of that unredacted file that went missing right before Trump scuttled out of office on January 20th. When he realized on the afternoon of January 6th that his insurrection wasn't going to succeed, he saw to his own survival and began redacting evidence that tied him to Russia's efforts to throw the 2016 election to him.

    In closed door testimony to federal investigators, Cassidy Hutchinson, Mark Meadow's former aide, said that she saw Meadows walk out of the White House with what was surely an unredacted version of the missing file. She'd also testified that his suit "smelled like a bonfire." She also claimed to have seen Meadows burning documents in a fireplace in the White House "roughly a dozen times."
     From her worm's eye view, Hutchinson gave stunning, detailed and compelling testimony that only an insider could provide. She'd started out, as they all did, as a Trump loyalist until the walls started falling down around the administration's ears. Suddenly, after the 2020 election that went to Joe Biden, right wing reporter John Solomon was briefly given a partial sum of the Russia file in a Whole Foods shopping bag. Meadows began burning documents so often his suit smelled like smoke.

    And, being a young woman in a male-dominated White House, no one was telling her much of anything. She must have felt like a young lieutenant in the bunker as the Red Army was closing in. It couldn't have been far removed from the flashback scene in Shutter Island in which burning embers of half-burnt Nazi documents floated in the air after the Allies liberated the camps.

     So, what was the reason for this mad, frenetic activity in the twilight of Trump's junta?

    Well, part of the reason was so Trump could redact incriminating evidence of his collusion with Russia and cherry pick details to disseminate to his right wing lickspittles in Congress and right wing media. His ultimate goal was to declassify the whole kit and kaboodle.

     But ultimately, that's not what happened and here's why:

    Trump was leaning on then-CIA Director Gina Haspel to officially do the declassification. Rightly fearing doing so would jeopardize the lives of the agents and assets who'd collected that massive amount of raw intelligence, not to mention the revelation of intelligence-gathering methods, Haspel dug in and refused to do it.

     Of course, Trump could have done the declassfication all on his own. He just didn't want to. And that's because Trump does things tribally. He knew damned good and well it was a horrible idea to declassify that document, by then shrunk down to 600 pages. But Trump always thinks like a mob boss, with an eye to possible comeuppance. He wanted someone to blame in case the declassification went sideways so he tried to preemptively set up Haspel as a sacrificial goat.

     Of course, when she wouldn't, rumors immediately began swirling around the Beltway speculating who would succeed her in the sure bet she'd get shitcanned (Which never happened. She stayed until the last day of the administration). But she wasn't the only one tapped for leaking duties. While Mark Meadows, like a Nazi commandant with the enemy at the gate, was busy making illicit use of the White House's fireplaces and getting WH lawyers to redact God knows what, Trump was already installing former Devin Nunes stooge Kash Patel and the aforementioned John Solomon as his representatives in the National Archives.

     Because, like the Mueller Report, Trump wanted to keep a tight lid on what was found out about him and to use his cronies to disseminate cherry-picked portions of the Russia file to his other right wing cronies.

     And now, no one knows where it is. It could be in a safe in Mark Meadows' house, as Cassidy Hutchinson speculated, or it could be in the Kremlin for all we know. Wherever it is, it leaves one burning question that no one's asking:

     As the epigraph above states, when lawmakers and their aides reviewed the file, it was considered so radioactive that it had to be viewed at CIA HQ at Langley, VA. Their work on it also had to be locked away in a safe. The Russia file was so sensitive, in fact, that the intelligence community referred to a "turducken". That meant when it wasn't being reviewed, it had to he kept in a safe and that safe locked inside a vault.

     So, if it was that Top Secret, how was Trump able to get an unredacted copy sent to the White House simply by asking for it? Who at CIA HQ allowed that to happen? 

     And why?