A year-and — half after former President Donald Trump was forced out of the White House, the FBI was forced to search his posh residence, Mar-a-Lago, in order to retrieve hundreds of highly classified documents which the ex-president had failed to turn over to the U.S. government.
Apparently, there are Trump White House insiders who have testified that the ex-president oversaw the frantic packing up of these top-secret documents, which would make him even more culpable in the crime of running off with extremely sensitive pieces of information that he had no right to possess. The question that is, so far, unanswered is: Why did he do it?
Reportedly, during his chaotic tenure as president, Trump was visibly inattentive and bored by intelligence briefings, yet he insisted on taking classified documents with him at the end of the day. Was he actually perusing this stuff in his bedroom while he spent the night tweeting and binge-watching right-wing media? Or did it just make him feel important when he held state secrets in his sweaty fingers? And was that ego boost the reason he took piles of classified documents with him to his glitzy palace in Florida?
There is dark speculation that Trump planned to use the information in those documents for his own self-serving purposes. A more innocent view is that he was just willfully ignorant of the rules governing the handling of classified information.
Perhaps, though, it is something in between. While in office, Trump never indicated that he understood that there are constitutional limits on presidential powers. He acted as if he were a king with the right to do any damn thing he wanted to do. It is entirely possible that he took all those dangerously sensitive documents simply because he figured they belonged to him and then he resisted returning them because a petty tyrant never gives in to his adversaries or admits a mistake.
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