Former Vice President Dick Cheney died yesterday, and that is almost all I am going to say about that. It is probably significant that Cheney spent his career boosting racism, torture, government-backed deception, and above all else the notion of an imperial presidency, one in which a Dear Leader figure and his top lieutenants could brush off impeding laws if they, personally, thought they had a good enough reason or just felt strongly enough about it.
The notion that presidents (and vice presidents, and Department of Justice officials, and anyone in the general presidential orbit) ought to have largely unconstrained power and that Congress could best serve the nation by shutting their pieholesâthat was his life's work. He was not alone in it, and it never rose to a philosophical stance more complex than because in the moment, it is personally convenient, and in the last years of his life he loathed and condemned Donald Trump, the now-once-again president who embraced notions of an "imperial presidency" for the same reasons Cheney didâbecause it was personally convenientâand scraped all the supposed dignity off it, presenting the grossest version outright.
Dick Cheney never retracted his own support for presidential criminality-as-necessary, mind you. He appears to have despised Trump out of pure factionalism: Cheney and his fellow neoconservatives built the Republican Party into a vehicle for harming The Poors and rewarding The Connected and always having at least one Good War either active or in the queue, but then Trump took it from them. It's one thing to be an incompetent narcissistic criminal, but stealing the carefully constructed racist, propaganda-fed, conspiracy-obsessed Republican base and using it against its builders? It was gauche.
But that is all I am going to say about that, because Dick Cheney will remain dead from here on in but the Republican embrace of the Nixon clan's willful criminality and the extending corollary, that presidents can do crimes if they feel like it, has now fully consumed the party's mind and body. It is the assertion of six carefully chosen monarchists on the Supreme Court; it so defines Congress that the House no longer feels the need to meet, lest by meeting they do something that might piss Dear Leader off.
And Dear Leader, for his part, has taken the notion of president-as-monarch very seriously. Not because he has strong opinions about what the shape of government ought to be, mind you: He's just very, very stupid. He is too stupid to follow laws, too self-absorbed to even care what they are, and exists in an eternal foggy now of self-pleasure and self-gratification.
Yet another new book has come out in which top national journalists tell us self-withheld details of the news stories they're supposedly covering in their day jobs. This one is about the nation-crushing failure to bring Donald Trump to account for All That Shit He's Done, and first indications are that it exists mostly to give us all aneurysms.
We were so close to a wealthy and powerful American being met with consequences after doing blazingly criminal things. So close. And America, as a nation, had to jump through so many hoops, dance on so many pinheads, and juggle so many flaming chainsaws to keep a billionaire from going to jail that it still astounds. Trump did a lot of crimes. Big-boy prison crimes, not stuff that can be shoved to the side as now-rote corporate financial scamming.
An excerpt on MSNBC goes into the immediate aftermath of the 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, the one that retrieved boxes of classified materials that Donald Trump had hoarded while in the White House, then shipped to Mar-a-Lago as his own personal property, then lied to Justice Department officials about having, then ordered underlings to hide when federal officials came calling. The quote being passed around is a Justice Department official's post-raid evaluation of what the raid uncovered: "If it was anybody else, we would arrest him tomorrow."
While we knew much about what the agents found and how serious it was, seeing it all in one place really brings home the recklessness and blatant criminality of Trump's thefts. Even the most charitable interpretation of Trump's motives ought to have landed him in a prison cellâeven if we ignore the elephant in the ballroom, the high odds that the forever-grifting lifelong money grubber stole the documents because he knew full well how valuable they could be to the right bidders.
In a hastily convened conference call that evening, Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen listened as his investigators described the hundreds of pages of top-secret records they found, some containing gravely serious material. Several detailed covert government operations and U.S. spying powers could get American operatives killed if the information fell into the wrong hands. Instead of the documents being kept under lock and key in a government safe, agents found them spilling out of boxes in Trumpâs personal office, his residence and even a bathroom shower. [...]
[Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen] donned a pair of rubber gloves as he looked through the stacks with two people standing by as minders. The gloves underscored the fact that these pages were evidence in a criminal case. Olsen didnât try to read every word but instead attempted to determine the severity of the national security threat if they had fallen into the hands of people without proper clearance.
In this painstaking way, Olsen, the assistant attorney general responsible for the Justice Departmentâs efforts to protect national security, learned that a handful of documents stored in boxes throughout Trumpâs club were so sensitive that even he didnât have authorization to look at them.
Olsenâs minders then told him about a fourth stack of documents, stored in a separate safe, explaining that only one agent in the field office was approved to handle them. Each of the documents in the safe bore a ticket with coding that described its unique handling instructions â above and beyond the strict approvals for highly sensitive top-secret and sensitive compartmented information.
Olsen got on the phone with his counsel to read the codes aloud, one by one, to determine if he had permission to view them. Some of the documents were so restricted that top Justice Department security officials reacted with surprise to the code names: They had never heard of them before. Some involved special access programs that required the president or a cabinet member to grant approval to view.
In this painstaking way, Olsen, the assistant attorney general responsible for the Justice Departmentâs efforts to protect national security, learned that a handful of documents stored in boxes throughout Trumpâs club were so sensitive that even he didnât have authorization to look at them.
I sincerely hope we get an explanation as to how, exactly, Donald Trump could regularly squirrel away documents so sensitive that people would die if they were released or that described programs so secret you have to get permission from a cabinet member to so much as look at themâand "somehow," for years on end, all these carefully tracked codeword-classified documents kept disappearing into Trump's sock drawers or underneath his bed and ... nobody fking considered that a problem?
Hundreds of pages were disappearing in this fashion, and none of the handlers raised an alert?
And then those hundreds of pages show up inside fking Mar-a-Lago, having been taken from the White House and hidden there, and for some reason none of this was known to the federal officers whose jobs it was to track these most-sensitive-of-all documents, making sure nobody was leaving them next to White House toilets or spread out on tables for every White House cleaning crew to thumb through?
Bullshit. That's completely implausible gold-plated bullshit. What we had here was an entire Trump White House intentionally ignoring classification protocols because the people Trump brought in with him were all firm believers in the "people in the White House get to do crimes" theories that had festered through the most partisan and most criminal elements of the Republican Party (see: Roger Stone.) Secrets about nuclear submarines, secrets about how the U.S. had so successfully infiltrated Putin's inner circle, all of that stuff was a freaking game and nobody cared.
Unbelievable. No, we need an explanation on that, and I can't come up with any plausible version that wouldn't require putting at least a half dozen other Trump White House officials in prison even if their boss did manage to skate.
Explanations of why Trump brought these hundreds of pages of top secret documents with him have always been sketchy. Most Trump defenders piped up, willingly, with excuses that the man is both such an idiot and so mired in his own narcissism that you simply can't convince him he doesn't "own" whatever government documents, and vases, and silverware, and East Wings might come into his vision. He didn't mean to catastrophically endanger covert agents and programs by putting four years worth of government secrets in an unlocked Mar-a-Lago storeroom or a chandelier-endowed bathroom, he's just so incredibly stupid that he didn't consider it would be a problem! And didn't realizing lying to federal officials who came to collect those documents would also be a problem! Really, say Trump's fiercest defenders, the man is almost too stupid to live, you can't ask him to abide by your smart-person laws and morals.
But we have seen considerably more about what Trump's unfettered mind looks like, since that 2022 raid. The notion that Trump is too much an idiot to understand document classifications is almost compellingâexcept that we have many other examples going on right now, in the papers, of Trump compulsively using the presidency for petty self-enrichment through whatever means he and his equally grubby offspring can invent. Presidential pardons, presidential watches, presidential "memecoins," frivolous lawsuits filed purely to prod big-cash "settlements," and a devotion to soliciting "donations" from every corporate titan who needs anything from the government he oversees; there is nothing Trump has not monetized.
The meticulous collection of classified documents, their subsequent theft, and Trump's efforts to hide them from federal attempts to get them back: That one we're supposed to take as mere coincidence?
Yeah, I ... don't think so. Or, rather, I would say that the theory that Trump is merely a criminal idiot who refuses to understand document classifications now has no more or less circumstantial evidence behind it than the competing theory that Trump knew he could extract money or favors from foreign supplicants if he had these documents in his possession. Nobody can pretend, here in 2025, that Donald Trump would not betray his country for a bit of cash. The whole of his second presidency is scrambling for cash. It is, through his whole life, the only job he's ever taken seriously.
Well, that and the (alleged) child rapes.
There is probably much more to this story that we still don't know. Surely, surely government officials under Biden delivered classified evaluations of just how much damage the shredding of any apparent White House security protocols under Trump may have caused the country. We know that some documents Trump allegedly showed to others, after leaving the presidency, remain unaccounted for.
The government has to operate under the assumption that every document that made it to Mar-a-Lago was seen by unknown someones, and they're not going to tell us what the damage is. (And, God help us, Trump's newest band of crime-backing thugs might well be shredding those reports as we speak.)
The level of distain Trump and his skittering creatures show for the rule of law does not make a good case for the "Trump took the documents for no good reason" defense. He took the documents because they were valuable, and he believes he has the right to turn a profit off his presidency.
We have to presume that if there's documents still missing, they might be missing because he ... sold them. Sold them, or gave them away, or told people about them then destroyed them to hide the evidence.
Yes, that would make him a traitor. That's what the "imperial presidency" means, in his mindâthe right to squeeze, cajole, and steal, unencumbered from oath or law. There is much, much more to this damn story and somebody had better start telling it before it's lost forever.
This is how you know, by the way, that the Republican Party has forever crossed the line from partisanship to anti-American criminality. Their blind eye to this, and to Trump's obvious participation in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, and indeed to any crime. These are not things that can be swept away under even a party-first theory of government; it is just corruption, pure and simple.
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