Thread by @SethAbramson

For those who think Trump will face some punishment for removing classified intel from the White House and taking it home to Florida, remember that his whole presidency was a national security scandal and *began* with him revealing Israeli intel to the Kremlin in the Oval Office

My point is, I want to get excited about the breaking news today but unfortunately I wrote three books about Trump’s national security violations and learned that not only does no one care when a POTUS is a national security threat but basically everyone agrees it must be ignored

Trump is the man who had a duty to warn U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi of a plot to kidnap him and instead did nothing—until he helped the man who had Khashoggi strangled, chopped up, and burned in a furnace escape responsibility for ordering the assassination of a Post journalist

And of course now Trump is an *ex*-POTUS, so you think that he can no longer be a virulent national security threat on a daily basis without consequences—until you realize that holding him accountable would embarrass a large number of powerful people so we’ll just have to skip it

It’s vital that journalists catalog every crime Trump committed so if there’s an America 1,000 years from now he will *still* be considered the worst president and biggest traitor in our history, but that is separate from thinking 15 boxes of classified intel will bring him down

The upper limit of where today’s breaking news goes is Trump is prosecuted in a case that takes 3 or 4 years and sees everyone associated with it threatened with death by MAGA terrorists on a daily basis, with the only result being that Trump gets 2 years of probation and a fine

That could change slightly if we find that he had input into which classified intelligence he would spirit out of the White House, and deliberately stole evidence he thought could be used to convict him, but even then the evidence would matter infinitely more than the theft of it

Remember, this is a man who was a focus of an 800-page DOJ report confirming unambiguously that he committed the federal felony of Obstruction of Justice at least a dozen times, and not only was he not prosecuted but DOJ is letting the statute of limitations lapse without comment

There are people in this country, in politics and law enforcement, whose *oaths* actually *compel* them to *ensure* that Trump is treated no differently than any other citizen—and all of America has watched them do f*ck-all since 2016 and that won’t change because of today’s news

This news will only matter if it can be linked to a broader criminal conspiracy to overthrow the federal government—which, to be clear, it is *entirely possible* that it ultimately will be

But that is *not* where we are tonight and that is *not* what the current breaking news is

Anyone on Twitter not being *very* clear that this is the 1000th national security scandal involving Trump—and I’m not exaggerating by much, because there really was one every few days for four years—and that none of them resulted in anything but news cycles is being disingenuous

The best part for me personally is that I can write a thread like this and still be confident that MAGA radicals will swear my response to today’s news was “he promised Trump would go to prison 🤣”

What I actually say matters as little to these people as what Trump actually does

And if you wonder what prompts me to write a bitter thread like this, read any one of the Proof books—or all three—and imagine how angry I am being a lawyer who has watched hundreds of my fellow “brothers and sisters at the bar” violate their oaths with respect to Trump for years