When it comes to Donald Trump and controversies surrounding classified information, there have long been two broad areas of concern. The first unfolded during and after the Republican’s presidency, with several instances in which Trump carelessly shared highly sensitive information for no apparent reason.
The second was Trump’s alleged decisions to take classified materials from the White House, bring them to his glorified country club in Florida, refuse to give them back, and obstruct the retrieval process, culminating in a felony indictment.
But as it turns out, those aren’t the only areas of concern. CNN published a new report about a binder that went missing from the Trump White House, which seems awfully important.
A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. 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.
A U.S. official familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News that the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed two years ago that a binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference had gone missing in the waning days of the Trump administration, as first reported by CNN.
The binder contained highly classified raw intelligence, the official said.
The committee has not been briefed since, and the official is not in a position to confirm CNN’s reporting that the missing binder has never been found.
As for the underlying article, according to the reporting, at issue is a large binder that included sensitive intelligence on Russia, which was last seen in the Trump White House in the final days of the Republican’s term. The documents were apparently brought to the White House as part of the outgoing president’s declassification efforts, and they were under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The plan, evidently, was for Trump to approve the disclosure of sensitive information, which would then be disseminated to partisan allies, despite the objections of national security officials and White House attorneys seeking redactions.
Now, no one seems to know where the unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence is. (It was not among the items found at Mar-a-Lago last year.) The full report is well worth your time — I’m just summarizing some of the toplines — and for political observers who enjoy a good mystery, the allegations raised in the CNN story are extraordinary. But reading this, I was also reminded of 2016, when voters were told that Hillary Clinton’s email protocols were one of the most pressing issues facing the nation. The political world actually seemed to take seriously the idea that a leader couldn’t be trusted to handle classified information if she had a private email server. Those concerns seem rather quaint seven years later.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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