OPINION: This article contains commentary which may reflect the author’s opinion
While the DOJ and FBI are refusing to say what the purpose was for the Monday raid on President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home, Americans are forced to get information from ‘media leaks’ or media’s secret sources about what the security agencies were looking for on that day and why.
Thursday night, a story was floating around that the FBI was searching for documents that showed Trump was leaking information about nuclear weapons.
Michael Tracey reported on the WAPO Leaks.
Leaks to WaPo now claim “documents relating to nuclear weapons” were “sought” at Mar-a-Lago. No word on whether they were recovered. Taking this story at face value, the DOJ decided to wait a year and a half before tracking down the USA’s most closely guarded nuclear secrets?
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 12, 2022
Those alleged leaks happened after a bizarre press conference by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who said he had personally signed off on the Florida raid and then said nothing at all about what he was looking for in Trump’s home and why.
Garland offered no transparency at all, but media leaks were all the American people had for transparency into the historical scandal.
And now, just as some people feared, the raid on Trump’s home has morphed into a discussion about Trump’s execution.
And oddly, former CIA Director Michael Hayden made a comment on social media that seemed to promote execution for leakers of nuclear secrets.
Hayden appears to have a narrative in mind, based on his social media posts Friday morning when he reposted this meme:
HEY KID DO YOU WANT SOME CLASSIFIED MATERIAL pic.twitter.com/A1KTxyxDaw
— Emma Salisbury (@salisbot) August 12, 2022
77-year-old Hayden is a pal of radical Barack Obama, he is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
During the discussion of media leaks about nuclear weapons found at Trump’s home, Hayden retweeted and quoted a post by historian Michael Beschloss, who shared a photo of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg with the comment, “Rosenbergs were convicted for giving U.S. nuclear secrets to Moscow, and were executed June 1953:”
“Sounds about right,” Hayden tweeted Thursday night.
Sounds about right. https://t.co/hJCjxhN2BQ
— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) August 12, 2022
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American citizens convicted in 1951 of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. The couple provided top-secret information that included valuable nuclear weapon designs. They were executed in 1953.
“Hayden’s comment came three days after FBI agents raided the Florida home of former President Donald Trump,” Newsmax reported.
Media reports have indicated that Monday’s action took place likely after an informant provided the Justice Department with information that confidential documents remained at the former president’s Florida residence.
If true, that would be a violation of the Presidential Records Act, and if charged and convicted, Trump would be ineligible to serve in the federal office again.
“Sources told the Washington Post that such classified information was among the items agents looked for in the search but declined to speak about any other materials that may have been sought. It remains unclear whether they found any nuclear documents. The report said the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment. Trump claims he has been cooperating with investigators looking for documents and decried the raid as being politically motivated,” Newsmax reported.
Trump attorney Christina Bobb cast doubt on there being nuclear records at Mar-a-Lago but could not say for certain when pressed Thursday evening by Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
“I have not specifically spoken to the president about what nuclear materials may or may not have been in there. I do not believe there were any in there,” she said, noting that Trump’s legal team has been thorough in finding documents to hand over to the Biden administration.
Hayden, a retired four-star Air Force general who served as director of the National Security Agency and later the CIA under former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020, showing an obvious conflict of interest.
“If there’s another term for President Trump, I don’t know what happens to America. Truth is really important but especially in intelligence. President Trump doesn’t care about facts,” Hayden, who suffers from aphasia as a result of a stroke in 2018, said in an ad from Republican Voters Against Trump.
Hayden is also one of the former intelligence officials who signed an October 2020 letter baselessly claiming Russian involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop stories that popped up in the final weeks of the presidential election cycle.
Hayden, who is also the founder of the Hayden Center at George Mason University, did not provide a comment when asked by the Washington Examiner for a report published in April.
From the October Politico coverage of that letter,
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings. Under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.
It feels like the ‘Deep State is escalating things very quickly.
Source: The Republic Brief