Donald Trump suspected of possessing codes to launch nuclear weapons

Andrey Yashlavsky

FBI agents raided Donald Trump’s Florida estate at Mar-a-Lago, apparently looking for classified documents on nuclear weapons. This may explain why the US Attorney General took the unprecedented step of ordering the FBI to break into the home of the former head of state.
The Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the investigation, reports that documents related to nuclear weapons were the main target of the hunt for FBI agents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort residence. What specific documents are in question and whether they belong to the arsenal of the United States or another country – the sources did not expand on this.
This information was released hours after U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland revealed that he had personally authorized a government request for a search warrant, said the Justice Department had asked a Florida court to declassify the warrant due to “substantial public interest,” and demanded to release information detailing what the feds found at the Trump estate.
The Attorney General (aka the U.S. Attorney General) confirmed that federal agents searched Trump’s Palm Beach estate on Monday to see if he illegally took records from the White House when he left the presidency last January.
Later, Donald Trump released a statement saying that not only would he not object, but, on the contrary, he called for “the immediate release of these documents” related to what he called “an un-American, unreasonable and unnecessary raid and hack.”
“Reveal the documents now!” the ex-President of the United States pointedly demanded.
Attorney General Gar-land’s statement follows a f-urious reaction to the sea-rch from Trump supporters, who called the actions of the security forces politically motivated. Against this backdrop, reports emerged that on Thursday a man who tried to break into the FBI office in Cincinnati was shot dead by police after he fled the scene.
Recall that the US Department of Justice is investigating the discovery of boxes of classified information that were delivered to Mar-a-Lago after the end of Trump’s presidential term. Detractors are trying to prove that Trump or his aides deliberately violated federal law regarding the rules for handling White House documents.
The press notes that during the presidency, Donald Trump was especially fixated on the US nuclear arsenal and boasted that he was privy to top secret information. In the summer of 2017, he told the US military leadership that he needed an arsenal comparable to that which he had at the height of the Cold War, which would require a tenfold increase in weapons. This demand is said to have led then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to call the president a “fucking moron”. Trump has publicly threatened to destroy both North Korea and Afghanistan.
In a book about Trump’s rule, Bob Woodward quoted him as saying, “We have things you haven’t seen or even heard of. We have things that Putin and Xi have never heard of befo-re… What we have is inc-redible.” Woodward claims he was later told that Ame-rica did have some new weapons system, and officials were “surprised” that Trump revealed the fact.
Cheryl Rofer, who worked on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos National La-boratory, says different levels of classification apply to different types of documentation. “Information about the design of nuclear wea-pons is called ‘secret data’ and is considered classified.” Rofer added: “There is no apparent reason for the president to have information about the design of nuclear weapons.”
Among the nuclear documents Trump routinely had access to was a secret version of the Nuclear Posture Review on US capabilities.
True, the exact nature of the documents with which Trump left the White House remains a mystery, and some former officials claim that he did not, as a rule, receive paper copies of classified reports. This had less to do with security concerns than with the way the president preferred to conduct his security briefings: Unlike some of his predecessors who read lengthy intelligence reports every day, Trump usually listened to briefings orally.
Another possibility that Cheryl Rofer points to is that Trump may have kept his plastic card, which looks like a credit card, but with the identification codes necessary to launch a nuclear weapon. However, these codes were changed after Trump left the White House, at the same time that Joe Biden took office as head of state at noon on January 20, 2021.
Be that as it may, if it turns out that Trump did indeed remove materials related to US nuclear capabilities from the White House, the question will inevitably arise why the former president needed such closely guarded secrets after leaving office. The possibility of such materials being stored in an unsecured facility where guests come and go and where they could be potentially vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence cannot but alarm US government officials.
To put it mildly, The New York Times, which dislikes the 45th President of the United States, notes that the FBI-arranged search in Mar-a-Lago became a “dramatic code” for many years of confrontation between Trump and American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Trump was remembered not only for his attacks on the “deep state” seeking to undermine his policies, but also for his unceremonious attitude towards highly classified information, which he considered his personal property and sometimes used to promote his political agendas. According to the newspaper, Trump’s behavior during his presidency caused such mistrust in the intelligence services that officials who held secret briefings for him sometimes withheld some confidential details from him – because some saw the president himself as a threat to national security.
Of course, in light of the upcoming midterm elections in the fall (and Trump’s plans to run for president in 2024), such a turn could hit the Republi-cans. Although there is an-other point of view, according to which, a former president who has become a victim of a search can even score political points.
Trump blamed the raid on his estate on “radical left Democrats and possible future political opponents who have a strong and powerful vested interest in attacking me, as they have done for the past 6 years.”
According to the ex-president, his lawyers and representatives are “fully cooperating” with the investigation. Trump added that the government could have “everything they wanted if we had it” and that “a very large number of agents” were involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid. “They ran ahead of themselves. Crazy,” he said.
Trump supporters accuse Democrats of using the federal bureaucracy as a tool to persecute the former president.
The New York Times columnist David Brooks expressed concern that an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago would boost Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 presidential election. In his opinion, the secret of Trump’s power lies in the fact that his “narrative” that “America is being destroyed by corrupt elites” sounds “believable to tens of millions of Americans.”
“Trump’s political career is kept afloat by the contempt of the elite. The more elites despise him, the more Republicans love him,” Brooks argued, adding that the FBI raid on Trump’s re-sidence united the Republi-can Party: “According to a New York Times/Siena Co-llege poll a few weeks ago, about half of Republican voters were ready to give up on Trump. In the same week, it seemed that the whole party rallied around him.