Whose Nuclear What?

There are, as I discussed yesterday, three major possibilities in the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago:

1. They genuinely went in looking just to reclaim classified documents improperly retained by Donald Trump and were genuinely surprised that Trump reacted by making a big public issue of the search;
2. They got tricked into doing so by an informant who was working for Trump or fed information by Trump’s people in order to create this controversy; or
3. They were using classified records as a pretext to search for material on some other issue — most likely January 6–related information.

Judging by the reaction thus far by Merrick Garland and in the leaks pouring out of the Justice Department and the FBI, it seems most unlikely that a pretextual search — if one was intended — was successful. Instead, the DOJ and the FBI are in damage-control mode, trying to convince the public that a search limited to classified records was necessary and legitimate. The vaguely menacing explanation that emerged was published through leaks to Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Perry Stein, and Shane Harris of the Washington Post:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation. Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

Trump, predictably, calls this a “hoax,” which tells us nothing: That’s what Trump would say if it were true, and it’s what he’d say if it was a gigantic lie. But . . . what exactly does “relating to nuclear weapons” mean? Much of the immediate reaction has assumed that this means something on the order of “Trump has the schematics to build a nuke” or “Trump is giving away our nuclear firing codes” or something. Historian Michael Beschloss compared Trump to the Rosenbergs, who were executed for handing over U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union when it was trying to catch up to us in nuclear capabilities early in the Cold War:

The Post offers no information and couches the possibilities in terms that suggest that its writers have no idea what kind of information they’re talking about:

Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts said. Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries might view exposing their nuclear secrets as a threat, experts said.

Whose nuclear secrets matters quite a bit, and so does what sort of information we’re talking about. In both cases, the reader is asked for blind trust. You never know with Trump, but the most irrational possibility is Trump having retained information on American nuclear capabilities. Whereas the thing that is most likely to cause political alarm in the Biden administration is Trump retaining information bearing on the nuclear ambitions of Iran or North Korea. Given the extensive track record of, yes, anti-Trump hoaxes that were originally run up the flagpole through anonymous leaks to the press — remember Alfa Bank, or the Afghan bounties story? — it would be prudent to wait and see on this one.