In the aftermath of the bombshell news regarding the FBI search warrant raid against Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, former New York Times national security expert Tim Weiner made an appearance on CNN’s New Day, where he explained his theory that the former president packed up numerous boxes of classified, top-secret documents to his Palm Beach country club/personal residence, in a desperate effort to find some sort of “smoking gun” in the material that would prove the “deep state” had been plotting against him, resulting in his two impeachments.
In the segment with CNN host John Berman, Weiner went further in-depth on a recent op-ed he penned for the New York Times, in which he wrote, “The Mar-a-Lago papers may well determine if Mr. Trump has a political future. That depends, in part, on the solution to several mysteries. What is in those files? Where did they come from? Whose fingerprints are on them? And who shows up on the surveillance tapes subpoenaed from the Trump mansion, which will show who went in and out of the rooms where they were hidden?”
Speaking to Berman on a recent New Day episode, Weiner expanded, “I think in the last chaotic days of the Trump administration, Donald Trump was desperate for documents that he thought would somehow absolve him of the offenses for which he was impeached and criminally investigated. I think that he believes that there is some smoking gun in the classified archives of the government that will somehow cleanse him and allow him to run again, that will provide him with political leverage.”
“Whether these documents are, in fact, helpful to the president or not is immaterial! He has no right to have them, they are the property of the American people, not a twice-impeached former president,” the national security expert went on to explain.
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Berman pressed for more details, asking, “You talk about what he did prior to leaving office and who he put in certain places. Why is that important here?”
“That’s right,” Weiner answered. “In the last year of his administration, President Trump put unqualified loyalists at the top of the intelligence community and the Pentagon, and he wanted them to rifle through the classified files in search of documents, which he believed would somehow cleanse him of the stain of his impeachments and of the counterintelligence investigation, the FBI launched six full years ago against Donald Trump and his inner circle.”
“These documents may or may not be what he was looking for,” he concluded. “In other words, he wanted his own set of secret files that he thought would be political ammunition and I believe that’s what’s in those boxes.”
Watch the segment here:
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
