Seth Abramson Profile picture
NYT bestselling Trump biographer. Lawyer. Songwriter. Journalism professor (retired). More: https://t.co/C61aEoBmYZ, https://t.co/j6EVBmIW3k

Aug 9, 2022, 10 tweets

(📢) This is serious—and fully explains the Mar-A-Lago search. Amidst an investigation seeking documents implicating national security, the FBI found that Trump’s agents were lying—a federal felony. And why were they lying? To *steal classified documents*. cnn.com/2022/08/09/pol…

What we don’t know yet is who directed these Trump agents to lie—though I’ll give you one guess who it’d probably have to be for them to willingly commit a federal felony the FBI routinely arrests people for—and why Trump desperately needed to hold onto these classified documents

It goes without saying that even a career criminal like Trump wouldn’t seek to steal classified documents unless those documents in some way incriminated him in a larger crime than the stealing of classified documents in the first place constitutes, so this is extremely serious

The conspiracy to hide these documents from the FBI also suggests a level of premeditation, desperation and coordination that points to how significant these national security-implicating documents must be, and suggests they’re documents the FBI needs for an ongoing investigation

The FBI is now engaged in the largest investigation in the history of the Bureau, and it’s focused on Trump and January 6, so if Occam’s Razor means anything it suggests Trump may be hiding classified documents that would incriminate him in Seditious Conspiracy or even Treason

While we can’t know these things for certain, I mention that they currently constitute the theory of the case all the extant evidence suggests as a way of underscoring that anyone presuming this was a political stunt is carefully rejecting every single more plausible explanation

After Watergate, Nixon had to resign because he sought to hide evidence that’d incriminate him in the break-in of a building that was a political target

Here, Trump apparently seeks to hide evidence that’d incriminate him in the break-in of a building that was a political target

So based on the information we have so far, understanding that there’s likely much more information to come, anyone who is upset that a court granted a search warrant to search Mar-A-Lago is in effect saying that Watergate never should’ve been investigated

Just keep that in mind

The search’s timing is exactly what we’d expect based on how long Trump kept the government records he stole, how long it took the FBI to review them and how long it’d take agents to realize key data was missing as they were being lied to by Trump’s agents likely at his direction

All in all the picture that emerges is of a former president committing crimes as significant as those in Watergate and instructing others to commit crimes on his behalf and then shrieking incoherently the moment federal law enforcement sought to do anything whatsoever about it

Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.

A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.

Keep scrolling