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Former President Donald Trump, along with one of his aides, has been indicted for federal crimes involving highly sensitive national-security documents. Trump and his enablers are already trying to brush the charges away as the result of a witch hunt over a minor issue, but this indictment shows why Trump was, and remains, a threat to national security.

Defiant Recklessness

Special Counsel Jack Smith has successfully petitioned to unseal the indictment of Donald Trump and his aide Walt Nauta on multiple charges revolving around Trump’s removal of classified material from the White House and his belligerent refusal to return them. The charges include making false statements, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding and concealing records, and willful retention of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act.

When Trump learned of the indictment yesterday, he and his devoted coterie of Republican apologists, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, got right to work trying to minimize the charges as a politically motivated “weaponization” of the law. Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who (at least in theory) is running against Trump, felt the need to side with the most notorious Florida Man now facing justice. As my colleague David Frum notes, this is about as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral, but the fact that DeSantis and others feel the need to placate such paranoia is indicative of how unhinged the GOP base has become.

Smith, however, isn’t pussyfooting around: The charges—38 of them—are a big deal. And before the GOP gaslighting reaches supernova levels, let’s also bear in mind that what Trump actually did is a big deal too. He claimed that he declassified, by fiat, boxes of classified information, and then appears to have left all of that material sitting in ballrooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms. To this day, he insists that he had every right to do whatever he wanted with America’s secrets. Fortunately, the court has unsealed the indictment, because Americans need to know, and care, about the magnitude of Trump’s alleged offenses.

To understand the severity of the charges against Trump, consider a thought experiment: Imagine that Vladimir Putin is one day driven from the Kremlin, perhaps in a coup or in the face of a popular revolt. He jumps into his limousine and heads for self-imposed exile in a remote dacha. His trunk is full of secret documents that he decided belong to him, including details of the Russian nuclear deterrent and Russia’s military weaknesses.

Now imagine how valuable those boxes would be to any intelligence organization in the world. I spent the early years of my career analyzing Soviet and Russian documents as an academic Sovietologist, and I would have loved to see such materials. Small, seemingly trivial details—something as innocuous as a desk calendar or a notepad—might not mean much to a layperson, but to a professional, they could be pure gold. To get even a peek at such Russian materials would be an intelligence triumph.

But of course, I would never have been able to lay my hands on them, because a cache of such immense importance, if U.S. operatives spirited any of it out of Russia, would have been secured in a vault somewhere deep in the CIA. Trump, meanwhile, left highly sensitive American documents lying around at a golf resort like practice balls on the driving range. According to the indictment:

The Mar-a-Lago Club was an active social club, which, between January 2021 and August 2022, hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests. After TRUMP’s presidency, The Mar-a-Lago Club was not an authorized location for the storage, possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents. Nevertheless, TRUMP stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club—including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

Actually, it might be harder to steal practice balls. “The Storage Room,” the indictment notes, “was near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop, and various other rooms.” These are not exactly low-traffic areas. Worse yet, the indictment asserts that Trump had some of these documents at his club in New Jersey, where he showed files to people who had no business seeing them. (One of them, according to the indictment, was something Trump claimed was a plan of attack on a foreign country prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official.)

Normally, when there is spillage of classified material—and such events are common, including during presidential transitions—it’s treated much like the spillage of toxic waste: Even if it’s an accident, everyone involved must cooperate to find the source of the spill, evaluate the amount of danger, and contain and clean the area. What Trump has already admitted to doing—taking classified documents and then defying the U.S. government’s repeated demands to return them—is like driving off with a truckload of toxic chemicals, splashing them around, and then, when the guys in the hazmat suits show up, telling them he had every right to dump out the barrels on his own property and that they can go take a hike.

Judging from the indictment (and its damning photographs), Trump did all of this while leaving some of the most tempting intelligence targets in the Western world open to theft or reproduction. The indictment is both astounding and horrifying, with pictures of classified materials sitting in unsecured boxes around Mar-a-Lago that could give hives to anyone who’s ever held a security clearance (as I did for most of my adult life). At this point, we may never know who saw what, or which documents are now in the hands of our enemies. In any decent democracy, this intentional and defiant recklessness with classified material would be added to the list of acts that should prohibit Trump from ever holding any position of government responsibility ever again.

Trump’s enablers, however, will try to set the agenda, just as they did when Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed his report in 2019 on Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians. Back then, Attorney General William Barr performed a major act of civic sabotage by bowdlerizing Mueller’s findings before anyone saw the actual report. I was in Switzerland at the time, and when a daily newspaper back in the United States asked me to write about the report, all I had to go on was Barr’s version; although I suspected that the full truth was worse, I could write only from what I had at the moment—which is exactly what Barr intended.

Trump-supporting Republicans are attempting to replicate Barr’s dishonest play by convincing Americans that Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have personally indicted Trump over a nothingburger. Like many who have commented on the documents fiasco, McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, and others must know that this is a flat lie, but it’s a lie that will work on millions of people. Smith and the government of the United States have made clear that Donald Trump has yet again betrayed his country. The rest of us should say so to our fellow citizens—and to those craven elected representatives who refuse to admit it—loudly and clearly.

Related:

An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies This indictment is different.

Today’s News

The White House released intelligence indicating that Russia plans to build a drone-manufacturing plant east of Moscow using materials supplied by Iran. Air quality has improved in the northeastern United States and Ontario as wildfires continue to burn in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada; firefighters from the U.S., France, and some Commonwealth nations have joined local fire crews in combating the ongoing blazes. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a video interview on Friday that Russia can “definitely state” that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

Dispatches

Books Briefing: The author Charles Portis was a “uniquely Southern” storyteller whose stories dripped with pathos and humor, Gal Beckerman writes.

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P.S.

As you can see, I am back from my vacation. Each year, I make a pilgrimage to Las Vegas; my wife and I are native New Englanders, but we have come to love the desert and the dry, clear air that gives us a break from humidity and allergies. (Every time I go to the Southwest, I think of the late Harry Anderson, playing the Boston trickster “Harry the Hat” on Cheers and sneering at a competing con man from Phoenix: “I was never impressed by Arizona hustlers, except they got good sinuses.”) I like the noise and bustle of casinos: I play some blackjack and throw some dice, and, yes, I know the odds are against me. Shush. Let me enjoy my kitschy moment of thinking I’m hanging with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis and Joey Bishop before their 3 a.m. show.

Speaking of the Rat Pack, I also love that at least a few Vegas steakhouses are trying to enforce a lost tradition: dress codes. I am a bear on this issue and always have been when it comes to fine dining. I caused a bit of consternation on Twitter when I said this the other day; there are people who think dress codes are outdated and uptight and even racist—which they can be, if they are enforced selectively. Otherwise, sorry, but not sorry: No beachwear and no tank tops, thank you. No ball caps. No overly revealing clothes, please, and gentlemen must wear closed-toe shoes. And if you reek of perfectly legal cannabis, that is your right, but (at least at one famous locale) you might not be seated. The days of jackets and ties are over, but there’s nothing wrong with dressing like an adult, and if you’re going to hang with the memory of Dino and Sammy, and drink overpriced bourbon, the least you can do is take off your hat and show up wearing a clean shirt.

— Tom

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.