I don't see nearly enough people talking about the staggering cost to the US and allies as a result of The Former Guy's theft.
Politics is one thing, but in the Intelligence and Counterintelligence communities, there are protocols. And one protocol you can take to the bank: When a man who is known to have back channel connections to literally every one of our enemies steals a trove of classified documents, you treat every single one of them as if they are now owned by our enemies.
Let the gravity of that sink in. Every single agent mentioned is now compromised. Every agent alluded to is compromised. Every combat plan is now available for all our enemies to develop countermeasures for. Every secret plan to develop intelligence on our enemies is now a dead end.
There were nuclear secrets in there.
How do you begin to calculate the impact and cost of the enemy knowing our nuclear secrets, including potentially our plans if Putin were to launch a limited nuclear strike?
We will never know the cost of it, because it's all SUPPOSED TO BE SECRET TO PROTECT US FROM OUR ENEMIES. But however much you think it cost, it was probably more.
The Defense Department and Intelligence Community don't have the luxury of hoping he didn't make the sales we all know he made.
They have to assume he sold all of it. Whether it's ever proven or not.
This is one of the worst crimes ever committed by a US citizen against the US.
@willallen but, 2 things:
1.) He could have easily traded secrets like that without moving documents to mar-a-lago or whatever. I mean, the mishandling of the documents seems orthogonal to whether he sold secrets or not?
2.) Other presidents and officials have inappropriately stored documents in their garage or whatever. Are we particularly worried about those? I don't think so, unless something new is discovered about how they were used.
The indictments talk about him showing military maps/etc or whatever to non-cleared people in his circle, though.
