On Friday morning, the Deep State ripped part of its curtain open in a stunning, unprecedented limited hangout. It’s hard to overestimate how profoundly significant this story is already, and it could be even bigger than
that.
Evidently the Biden Administration lost something even more dangerous than its temporarily-lost F-35 high-tech fighter jet. (FYI, no pictures of the alleged F-35 crash site in West Virginia have ever been released. So.)
An unredacted copy of the complete Crossfire Hurricane file is missing, and the deep state is starting to
freak out.
It started Friday morning when CNN broke a massive, hastily-written, long-form story headlined, “
The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump.”
Somehow blaming Trump, CNN’s jumbled, nearly-incomprehensible story quoted twelve (!) anonymous informants essentially describing an invisible war and a massive search happening for two years behind the scenes in Washington. It’s an international manhunt chasing a missing, completely-unredacted copy of an ultra-top-secret — so top-secret its radioactive — Crossfire Hurricane investigation file. What’s in it?
Something about Russia, that’s all they’re saying for now.
In case you’ve somehow forgotten, Operation Crossfire Hurricane was the FBI’s code name for its massive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act shadow project to illegally wiretap the Trump Campaign. It started with Hillary Clinton’s fake “dossier” of evidence supposedly showing that Trump was a sold-out Russian agent (among even more lurid claims obviously designed for leaking to salivating media), and featured bizarre deep state characters like Peter Strzok, his love-bunny Lisa Page, their “insurance policy” in case of a Trump election, and all that kind of stuff. You remember.
In the final hours of his Presidency, Trump issued an executive order de-classifying the entire Crossfire Hurricane file, but panicked DOJ officials delayed carrying Trump’s order out, until Biden was sworn in and promptly re-classified the materials. Between the lines, over the last two years Trump and Biden have been engaged in a long, slow-motion legal battle over whether Trump’s declassification “stuck” or not.
CNN’s story described how there were lots of copies of the Crossfire Hurricane file flying around:
The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents, setting off a flurry of activity in the final 48 hours of his presidency. Multiple copies of the redacted binder were created inside the White House, with plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.
But copies initially sent out (by Trump’s team) were frantically retrieved at the direction of White House (DOJ) lawyers demanding additional redactions.
Trump wanted
the American people to see it all, and even forwarded copies to various friendly journalists, in what sounds like a massive, invisible intelligence battle in Washington D.C.:
Trump’s White House had planned to distribute the declassified documents around Washington, including to Trump-allied conservative journalist John Solomon. But Trump’s order did not lead to its release – and earlier this year Solomon sued the Justice Department and National Archives for access to the documents.
His court filings provide colorful details of the last-minute scramble.
Solomon claims that on the night of January 19, Mark Meadows invited him to the White House to review several hundred pages of the declassified binder. One of Solomon’s staffers was even allowed to leave the White House with the declassified records in a paper bag.
The documents were returned uncopied the next morning, on January 20, by a Secret Service agent, in a Whole Foods grocery bag.
CNN’s article included lots of helpful infographics that made everything clear as mud.
According to CNN, while Trump was sending binders out, the DOJ and Secret Service were racing around Washington scooping up Trump’s binders from the various journalists, claiming that more redactions were needed before anyone could see it. Then DOJ lawyers slow-walked those alleged redactions until
after Biden’s inauguration, and ran out the clock. Nobody got any copies. And now the DOJ considers the binder to be re-classified.
Buried at the very bottom of CNN’s twenty-page article was Trump’s position, which is that it’s all
still declassified:
“We gave them those declassified documents -- I want to stress they were declassified documents -- to do a final redaction for some of that personal information, with the instruction that they were to go ahead and disseminate those,” Mark Meadows said. “We expected fully that they would do that, at the most a few days -- but here we are a few years later.”
As lurid as those details are, there’s a bigger problem: One of the ultra-top-secret binders
is still missing. And it’s one of the
unredacted ones. The FBI has been desperately searching for it for
two years now. Apparently, they’re getting
increasingly desperately, and so
now they’ve taken the historically unprecedented step of
going public. CNN article — obviously a security state intentional leak — was kind of like putting out an APB on the missing binder:
In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found. Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.
An unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing amid the chaotic final hours of the Trump White House. The missing binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office.
This story sheds a lot of light on events over the last two years, like the unprecedented raid on Trump’s house. But the FBI couldn’t find the binder when they searched Mar-a-Lago, which probably made Merrick Garland’s head explode. It seems pretty clear
this binder was the
real reason for the historically-unprecedented raid on a former President’s personal residence. CNN, presumably informed by its twelve anonymous informants, observed:
The binder was not among the classified items found in last year’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
That must have been
very disappointing.
Everyone is super-curious about what the missing binder contains and how politically-damaging it must be to the Biden Administration. CNN only said the binder’s ultra-top-secret classified information on Operation Crossfire Hurricane relates to 2016 election interference, which CNN says was done by the wily Russians. How CNN knows this, without knowing the binder’s contents, is anybody’s guess. But the information is incredibly “sensitive”:
The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were only able to review the material at CIA headquarters in Langley. The binder is 10 inches thick and contains reams of information about the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But the raw intelligence on Russia was among its most sensitive classified materials.
Why would the deep-state leak this lost-file story
right now? Again, CNN claimed having
over a dozen anonymous sources who spoke to its reporters about the “ultra-top-secret” classified information:
More than a dozen sources familiar with the matter requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.
Twelve is a lot of sources. And all anonymous. And all suddenly offering to talk about a binder that has been missing for two years now. Not one of the twelve came forward before now. So … why now? Salon’s article said “intelligence officials” are suddenly, after two years, “concerned” that our “most tightly-guarded national security secrets will be exposed:”
The only clue CNN offered as to why now was a singular mention of the fact that Trump’s lawyers are now requesting the very same documents in discovery in one of Trump’s lawsuits. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence?
Trump’s lawyers are now seeking access to the classified intelligence from the 2016 election assessment as they prepare for his defense against charges stemming from efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Weird. Also, CNN didn’t mention this, but Trump’s attorneys also filed
two required notices that they intend to use top-secret materials in his election-interference case. Might these materials be the very same “election interference” documents from the little lost Crossfire Hurricane binder?
It seems to me that, if the Biden Administration
doesn’t know for sure whether Trump has the binder or not, then they also don’t know whether they can cheat in discovery and produce a fake binder instead. If Trump can prove they destroyed or faked evidence, it would be
very bad for the government. So … they’ll first try to fight producing the file
about election inteference but — because they don’t know what Trump has — they might have to turn over the real thing if the Court orders them to.
And that means …
what? What was Trump trying to tell us when he declassified the binder in the first place? What is the Biden Administration so terrified will leak out that they’re doing … all of this super-gross banana republic stuff? Breaking through red line after red line?
The government is coming apart at the seams trying to keep this information buried.
I wasn’t the only one who noted how discombobulated CNN’s article was. Later in the afternoon on Friday, the New York Times reported on CNN’s story and described its details as “murky”:
Among other murky details, it is not known how many copies were made at the White House or how the government knows one set is missing.
Other murky details. Those aren’t the only details murky about this story.
I’m writing this late on Friday afternoon. More news may have broken over the weekend to clarify things or add context, so forgive me if anything’s out of date. But from where I’m sitting, no matter what happens, this is
massive news. Twelve anonymous witnesses don’t just pop out of a box, all on the same day, and all leak ultra-top-secret information, even if it was just the binder’s
subject matter and the fact it was missing. This is a
heavily coordinated deep state narrative-crafting play, and it smacks of panic, or maybe some kind of desperate limited-hangout.
I call it desperate because, while it might prime democrats to blame Trump for “stealing secret information,” it exposes parts of the real story despite their efforts to craft a complicated narrative around some pretty simple facts. For instance, journalist Matt Taibbi quickly called out the deep-state’s switcheroo:
So … just when you thought things could not possibly get weirder — they just got weirder. Strap in, here we go!
A massive hidden war is playing out behind the scenes in the Trump cases; three top SADS cases; and a fascinating interview with a bright doctor who used to be a vaccine bully.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
