Mar-a-Largo raided by FBI?

[lpetrich]

Now to what might be in the Mar-a-Lago about nuclear weapons, a *lot* of things:

• How to build a nuclear bomb
• US nuclear bombs and where they are stored and deployed
• Nuclear bombs of other countries, including plans to develop them

Nuclear bombs are far from trivial to build. I'll go through the details of their construction.

Nuclear bombs work by rapidly bringing together pieces of fissile material so that they will make an out-of-control fission reaction. Let's say each neutron releases two neutrons for each fission it causes, and that each neutron causes another fission. Then the resulting chain reaction makes the number of neutrons increase exponentially: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ...

But if a chunk of fissile material is smaller than a certain size, then many of its neutrons will escape, and it won't be able to sustain a chain reaction. But if it is larger than that size, then even if only a little bit more than one neutron makes a new fission, then it will be able to sustain a chain reaction. That size is the "critical mass".

One has to bring the pieces together as fast as one can, so as to get a big blast.

There are two main ways to do so: gun bombs and implosion bombs.  Nuclear weapon design

Gun bombs are relatively simple, but they are not very efficient, and they have seldom been built. However, the Hiroshima bomb was a gun bomb.

Implosion bombs are more complicated, since they require precisely-timed explosions over the entire surface of a hollow sphere of fissile material. However, nearly every nuclear bomb ever built has been an implosion bomb, including the one tested and the Nagasaki bomb.

 

[lpetrich]

Then a weird theory of why these papers: BREAKING: Disturbing New Theory About Trump’s Nuclear Documents - YouTube by Kyle Kulinski and Krystal Ball

KK never considered Russiagate very convincing, and he considers the Trump Admin very anti-Russian. I don't agree, because Trump was such a Putin-lover. I think that some of Trump's underlings overrode him and made that admin more anti-Russian than what Trump might have wanted.

But KK and KB agreed that Saudi connections are much more important, and that Saudi Arabia might be trying to develop a nuclear bomb. Will it be a simple one, a gun bomb? Or a more typical one, an implosion bomb?

Trump Admin-Saudi Nuclear Probe Resurfaces Ahead of Warrant Unseal

A probe into Donald Trump's interactions with Saudi Arabia has resurfaced following a report FBI agents who raided the former president's Florida residence were seeking documents related to nuclear weapons.

Citing anonymous experts in classified information, The Washington Post said the search showed concern among U.S. government officials about what kind of information could be located at the Mar-a-Lago Club and whether it could fall into the wrong hands.

...
Fordham University law professor Jed Shugerman tweeted: "Why would Trump want to keep nuclear documents?" "It is time to review the 2019 House Oversight Committee's stunning allegations of nuclear corruption," between the Trump administration and "Saudi/Qatar."

That committee report made a number of accusations against the Trump administration, including that it tried "to rush the transfer of highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia." This was without congressional review and in potential violation of the Atomic Energy Act that restricts the export of U.S. nuclear technology.

Last year, US lawmakers introduce bill to stop Saudi Arabia from obtaining nuclear weapons | Middle East Eye - "Measure would stop 'most US arms sales' to the kingdom if it receives help in building nuclear facilities that do not meet IAEA standards"

Senators Markey and Merkley Announce Legislation to Guard Against Middle-East Arms Race, Stop Saudi Arabia From Acquiring Nuclear Weapons
and
Senators Markey and Merkley, Representatives Castro and Lieu Reintroduce Legislation to Stop Saudi Arabia from Acquiring the Building Blocks for Nuclear Weapons

Washington (April 15, 2021) – Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia Subcommittee, and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and Representatives Joaquin Castro (TX-20) and Ted Lieu (CA-33), Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, today reintroduced the Stopping Activities Underpinning Development in Weapons of Mass Destruction (SAUDI WMD) Act. Press reports in September 2019 revealed that Saudi Arabia may have cooperated with China to build a ballistic missile production facility inside Saudi Arabia. This alleged missile cooperation was followed by press reports that China is also aiding Saudi Arabia in mastering the early stages of the nuclear-fuel cycle, outside international safeguards.

His bill:
S.1146 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): SAUDI WMD Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

Stopping Activities Underpinning Development In Weapons of Mass Destruction Act or the SAUDI WMD Act

This bill establishes measures to inhibit the development of nuclear weapons by Saudi Arabia.

Specifically, the bill restricts the sale of specified munitions items to Saudi Arabia if, in the last three fiscal years, Saudi Arabia has taken certain steps towards developing nuclear weapons.

Further, the bill requires the President to submit to Congress a written determination detailing (1) whether any foreign person knowingly engaged in the trade of specified weapons subject to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) with Saudia Arabia in the last three fiscal years, and (2) the sanctions the President has imposed or intends to impose against those persons. (The MTCR is an informal political understanding among states that seek to limit the proliferation of missiles and missile technology.)

The bill also requires the Department of State and the Department of Energy to submit a report on MTCR compliance and a strategy to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and missiles in the Middle East.

 

[ZiprHead]

WHO gathered these Top-Secret documents for Trump? It's not like he reads or knows what he is looking at... He had HELP. Help from the Energy Dept? Help from the CIA? Help from NSA? Help from DNI? All of the above?

Good questions.

 

[ZiprHead]

Exclusive: Trump Raid Documents Could Reveal Informants on U.S. Payroll

The FBI sought to retrieve above-Top-Secret documents dealing with "sources and methods"—which Donald Trump does not have the authority to declassify.

www.newsweek.com

In pursuing the unprecedented search of Donald Trump's residence on Monday, the FBI was seeking to retrieve Top Secret and "compartmented" documents dealing with intelligence "sources and methods," two federal government sources tell Newsweek—documents with the potential to reveal U.S. intelligence sources, including human sources on the American government payroll.

This greatly complicates any public discussion of the documents or any substantiation of Trump's potential violation of U.S. law. The sources, who were briefed on the investigation, requested anonymity in order to discuss sensitive information.

 

[TomC]

"This greatly complicates any public discussion of the documents or any substantiation of Trump's potential violation of U.S. law. The sources, who were briefed on the investigation, requested anonymity in order to discuss sensitive information."

Whatever happened to Gitmo?
We've still got it, right?
Tom

 

[blastula]

 

[Copernicus]

WHO gathered these Top-Secret documents for Trump? It's not like he reads or knows what he is looking at... He had HELP. Help from the Energy Dept? Help from the CIA? Help from NSA? Help from DNI? All of the above?

Good questions.

Those documents were kept in an unsecure location for a year and a half. Trump thought that his power to declassify was unlimited and subject to just his whims, but declassification is a process. It means that the documents need to be cleansed by people who understand what the sensitive material is that got them classified in the first place. Then the security classification markings have to be removed.

There are a lot of questions that investigators will want to have answers for, but Trump will likely refuse to cooperate.

1) Who had access to those documents since they came into Trump's possession?
2) Who knew that he had the documents?
3) Who did he discuss the contents with?
4) Were copies ever made of any of the contents?
5) Why were they removed from the White House?
6) What locations were they stored in?

 

[ZiprHead]

Trump Lawyer Says He Watched Search On Camera, Muddling Claim That FBI Planted Evidence

The Trump family was “actually able to see the whole thing,” attorney Christina Bobb said of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.

www.huffpost.com

 

[ZiprHead]

Trump Lawyer Told Justice Dept. That Classified Material Had Been Returned

The lawyer signed a statement in June that all documents marked as classified and held in boxes in storage at Mar-a-Lago had been given back. The search at the former president’s home on Monday turned up more.

www.nytimes.com

At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said.

The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.

The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday, an extraordinary step that generated political shock waves.

 

[atrib]

Any explanation for WHY Trump committed this crime? Is it simply that he is the sort of moronic bully for whom purposeless crimes are an end in themselves — just to brag that he's above the law and can thumb his nose at prosecutors and judges?

He stole this material because he believed he could trade it to gain some political and/or financial benefits in the future. He may have believed that he could sell some or all of this information to the Saudis or the Russians or any number of interested parties. That is the most obvious explanation.

Trump lacks curiosity and can barely read, and it is highly improbable that he would have collected this vast horde of material so he could read them later at his leisure. Given the volume of the material recovered to date (50 boxes or more), this was clearly not a decision he made on the night before his departure from the White House - he must have been accumulating these documents over an extended period of time. That suggests premeditation.

 

[atrib]

Trump Lawyer Told Justice Dept. That Classified Material Had Been Returned

The lawyer signed a statement in June that all documents marked as classified and held in boxes in storage at Mar-a-Lago had been given back. The search at the former president’s home on Monday turned up more.

www.nytimes.com

At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said.

The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.

The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday, an extraordinary step that generated political shock waves.

Thats where the obstruction line item listed on the warrant comes from.

 

[Toni]

"This greatly complicates any public discussion of the documents or any substantiation of Trump's potential violation of U.S. law. The sources, who were briefed on the investigation, requested anonymity in order to discuss sensitive information."

Whatever happened to Gitmo?
We've still got it, right?
Tom

Yeah but that was us unjustly imprisoning and torturing people who might have been 9/11 attackers or their supporters and they're mostly brown.*

This (Trump stealing and probably selling or at least sharing Top Secret info with our enemies) affects US and potentially endangers every one in the US and also the world.

So, on one hand, we (or some of us) feel we had some justification to imprison and even torture some people from some other countries. Some were perhaps justly imprisoned and others, probably not. NO justification for torture, ever, period.

* In case it wasn't obvious to all, that first sentence was ironic. Of course Gitmo was and remains an horrific stain on the US. But no, it does not come close to the stain that is Trump whose corruption and cowardice and treason will have horrible repercussions for generations in the US and across the globe.

 

[bilby]

One has to bring the pieces together as fast as one can, so as to get a big blast.

The trick is to keep the pieces together for long enough that a large majority of your extremely expensive fissile material actually fissions.

Implosion bombs are far better for this, as the relatively slow chemical explosion holds the rapidly fissioning material in place against its own attempts to fling itself apart; Gun bombs basically blow themselves up before they can finish exploding, giving very low yields for a given amount of fissionable material, and producing a very 'dirty' weapon that generates a lot of radioactive contamination.

In terms of dollars per enemy casualty, the Hiroshima bomb was by FAR the most expensive weapon ever deployed, and the only weapons system that even comes close to being as expensive is the Nagasaki bomb.

Nuclear weapons are very difficult to make; Even "simple" gun bombs like the one used on Hiroshima are far from being easy to build, and a very large part of the difficulty is in the highly detailed and precision layout and timing of the design. It cost the USA massive amounts of money and effort to work out those details, and even with a crash program involving the top brains from the US, UK, Poland, France and other allies, it took half a decade to complete.

And thermonuclear weapons (fusion bombs) are even more complex, as they need a fission bomb that has a similarly complex design to that of its own chemical explosive trigger, to assemble and sustain a sufficiently hot and dense condition for the fusion components to react before they themselves disassemble the device. Physicists at Los Alamos developed a suitable unit of time to understand these processes, the "shake"; A shake is approximately ten nanoseconds, the time required for neutrons travelling at 3% of c to cross the diameter of the fissile core, and a nuclear weapon takes approximately ten shakes to complete its detonation.

It's easy to see why the Department of Defense are very keen indeed that anyone who wants their own bomb should be forced to repeat this arduous and expensive research, rather than just being able to look up the results of the American R&D process.

 

[bilby]

WHO gathered these Top-Secret documents for Trump? It's not like he reads or knows what he is looking at... He had HELP. Help from the Energy Dept? Help from the CIA? Help from NSA? Help from DNI? All of the above?

Good questions.

Those documents were kept in an unsecure location for a year and a half. Trump thought that his power to declassify was unlimited and subject to just his whims, but declassification is a process. It means that the documents need to be cleansed by people who understand what the sensitive material is that got them classified in the first place. Then the security classification markings have to be removed.

There are a lot of questions that investigators will want to have answers for, but Trump will likely refuse to cooperate.

1) Who had access to those documents since they came into Trump's possession?
2) Who knew that he had the documents?
3) Who did he discuss the contents with?
4) Were copies ever made of any of the contents?
5) Why were they removed from the White House?
6) What locations were they stored in?

...President Trump, President Trump's wife, all President Trump's wife's friends, their families, their families' servants, their families' servants tennis partners, some chap I bumped into in Mar a Lago the other day called Abdul.

 

[bilby]

Trump Lawyer Told Justice Dept. That Classified Material Had Been Returned

The lawyer signed a statement in June that all documents marked as classified and held in boxes in storage at Mar-a-Lago had been given back. The search at the former president’s home on Monday turned up more.

www.nytimes.com

At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said.

The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.

The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday, an extraordinary step that generated political shock waves.

The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why Mr Trump's pants underwent an unprecedented spontaneous combustion on June 3, as reported elsewhere.

 

[Ford]

WHO gathered these Top-Secret documents for Trump? It's not like he reads or knows what he is looking at... He had HELP. Help from the Energy Dept? Help from the CIA? Help from NSA? Help from DNI? All of the above?

Good questions.

Those documents were kept in an unsecure location for a year and a half. Trump thought that his power to declassify was unlimited and subject to just his whims, but declassification is a process. It means that the documents need to be cleansed by people who understand what the sensitive material is that got them classified in the first place. Then the security classification markings have to be removed.

There are a lot of questions that investigators will want to have answers for, but Trump will likely refuse to cooperate.

1) Who had access to those documents since they came into Trump's possession?
2) Who knew that he had the documents?
3) Who did he discuss the contents with?
4) Were copies ever made of any of the contents?
5) Why were they removed from the White House?
6) What locations were they stored in?

Of course Trump will refused to cooperate, but as we're learning, even people close to him will flip if the correct pressure is applied. He hires people based on his own (very poor) personal judgement, and that has failed him more than a few times lately. Cassidy Hutchinson, anyone? The FBI and DOJ can apply quite a lot more pressure than a Congressional Committee. Plus, we already know that someone Trump trusted enough to know what was in the documents and where they were stored already flipped.

We don't know what damage has been done by the release/sale/trading of these secrets, but rest assured the people who knew the answers to most or all of the above questions would be right to be very, very concerned about their own future freedom.

 

[Angry Floof]

No, it won't.

I wish he'd try that.

 

[bilby]

We don't know what damage has been done by the release/sale/trading of these secrets,

The problem, as General Melchett eloquently illustrates above, is that once the strict controls on who has access have been compromised, the number of people who know (or might reasonably be expected to know) a given secret, grows far faster than it can be contained.

That's why they have SCIFs to begin with. You need to be 100% sure that there's not a janitor or repairman or window cleaner who might have incidental access to sensitive material.

I sincerely doubt that all the cleaners and groundskeepers (and their families, families' tennis partners, etc.) at Mar a Lago are vetted, read-in, and officially and legally known to be trustworthy enough to be permitted access; And there's zero reason to expect that none of them have had any possible opportunity to access this material.

 

[TomC]

No, it won't.

The claim by Trump's attorney sounds more like throwing Trump's less astute followers a bone.

"This isn't about national security. It's all about keeping Trump from running for president in 2024."
Tom

 

[Rhea]

He stole this material because he believed he could trade it to gain some political and/or financial benefits in the future. He may have believed that he could sell some or all of this information to the Saudis or the Russians or any number of interested parties. That is the most obvious explanation.

Trump lacks curiosity and can barely read, and it is highly improbable that he would have collected this vast horde of material so he could read them later at his leisure. Given the volume of the material recovered to date (50 boxes or more), this was clearly not a decision he made on the night before his departure from the White House - he must have been accumulating these documents over an extended period of time. That suggests premeditation.

This is a really REALLY insightful point.

It did take a long time to accumulate this trove of documents. It would have taken a long time. It is indeed clear this was not a last minute decision.


I also wonder when some/many/most of those documents went to Mar-a-Lago (it did not all happen on moving day), and therefore how MANY people knew they were there and for how many years they were unsecured.