For the Record: January 6 Meets Mar-a-Lago

Posted this expansion of the January 1 post as a Twitter thread,  but I've messed up the threading in at least a couple of places. What follows is a more or less unformatted version.

Talking about mishandled classified documents, did I ever tell you about the time Mark Meadows stole a large number of photocopies of classified docs from the White House, some to give to well-known rightwing journalists, some for purposes unknown? On or about January 19 2021?

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Actually I did, in a blogpost of January 1 this year http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2023/01/narratology-new-on-mar-lago-documents.html, but that was more for the fun of scooping the real journalists who, I assumed, would be jumping on the story in the next couple of days. Only they didn't.

So I'm pushing it out On Here.

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The material is basically from Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the J6 Committee of 5/17/22, just after she's been talking about Meadows improperly burning documents in his fireplace in 12/21, after discussions with Scott Perry about "election matters". https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041/pdf/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041.pdf 

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Starting p. 44, Cheney turns the discussion to whether Meadows ever took any documents home, and on p. 46, gets more specific:

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I'm pretty sure those are envelopes we've seen, folders actually in the FBI photo from Mar-a Lago, red for Secret/SCI (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information) as opposed to yellow for Top Secret/SCI.

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Then they move on to the subject of some documents of interest to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, or more specifically the HPSCI's Republican minority at this point, Ranking Member Devin Nunes, and his (redacted) staff director. 

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Note how the pretense that the documents in question might not be classified starts melting away.

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It's around 12/28, and they're anxious to get this done in Meadows's office, though the documents belong to the HPSCI, which has its own SCIF,  before the Biden administration moves in: "The reality of them having unlimited access to his office to review docs is dwindling."

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Why? Hutchinson can't say,  at least not in an unclassified setting, but it seems clear that they don't want to do this review in a place where the Democrats of the majority stand a chance of finding out about it. You're also mindful of Nunes's history https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/politics/devin-nunes-intelligence-reports.html

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Nunes chairman of the Intelligence Committee until after the 2018 election, Nunes on the presidential transition claiming Trump was being spied on in 2016, Nunes engineering the declassification of the "Nunes Memo", Nunes leaving politics to be CEO of "Truth Social".

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Anyway the documents--several boxes of them--arrived, if by a somewhat mysterious route, Meadows and Pat Cipollone studied them to make sure they the ones Nunes wanted, and the "review" by the Intelligence Committee staffers took place.

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That process was finished by January 3, and then, somehow, the documents just stayed in the White House:

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Then Hutchinson takes a break. When the recess is over, she's jumped ahead a a couple of weeks, to the last two days before the Biden inauguration, and a remarkable scene:

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She can't specify "each of the things I am thinking about" because the testimony is designed to be heard by people without security clearances. But she can tell you a bit about where they were destined to go.

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It turns out the "private sector is the world of wingnut journalism. Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist, and a misspelled John Solomon, formerly of The Hill, noted collaborator of Rudolph Giuliani in the fabrication of fake news about Hunter Biden and Marie Yovanovitch.

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Meadows also invited Hutchinson to offer copies to then Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, but he declined: "I don't want any of that." And then there's the orangutan in the room, who definitely wanted something, but that's where the conversation definitively breaks down:

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So there seems to be evidence of (1) yet another Nunes prank, in which he effectively steals secret documents from his own committee on Trump's behalf, hiding his own role from the committee's Democrats;

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(2) a connection between the Stop the Steal intrigues managed by Meadows and the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case (surely that's where some of the HPSCI documents went);

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And don't forget that John Solomon, along with Kash Patel (author of the Nunes Memo), is Trump's representative to the National Archives. Curiouser and curiouser.

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And finally let's just ask ourselves what Meadows, Nunes, that redacted HPSCI staffer, Patel, Solomon, and Trump aimed to DO with that stuff that they worked so hard and deviously to move from the Hill to Palm Beach.