Narratology: New on the Mar-a-Lago Documents

 

Happy New Year!

Hutchinson testified on May 17 that “boxes of documents on dollies” were delivered from the Intel Committee to Meadows, and that he copied them and gave some to people in the private sector. This was when she was describing how Meadows also burned documents in the fireplace.

— Diana Manister (@DianaCialino) December 31, 2022

I really wasn't planning to take on any new cases from the January 6 Committee releases, at least not right away. There's so much to read! And the interview transcripts aren't even searchable, at least this one isn't.  But Mark Meadows doing something funky—trafficking?—with classified documents in the White House was too much to resist, and I had to look. What kind of classified documents? What kind of folks in the private sector? What the hell?

Obviously I had to take a look, and I did find something that may be pretty significant, in regard to an issue we're already officially interested in, and literally nobody knows about it other than probably Liz Cheney and her colleagues on the Committee, who, if I'm getting this right, want us, or Jack Smith, to figure it out without their having to say it out loud. Serious, it looks an answer to some pretty big questions.

It's from the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony, as noted, and it seems to be a conversation about Meadows doing stuff with papers incuding throwing them into the fireplace, specifically things having to do with "the vice president's role on January 6th" and a conversation with Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania congressman at the center of the conspiracy to make Jeffrey Clark the attorney general and IMO the most likely candidate in the House for an indictment, and then it takes a kind of startling turn:

And more than that, in a more extended period. and some of them might have been from the President's Daily Briefing, but some of them might not, and Hutchinson isn't sure whether they were ever returned to the responsible staffer, Eliza Thurston, and then, starting December 28, some materials that were going to be "brought over" to the White House "for review" by our friend Mr. Nunes, ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

To which she'd objected, in the first place, because that wasn't really a proper place for looking at classified documents—she was insisting on a more appropriate venue. And the documents belonged to the HPSCI, not to the White House:

 Which may or may not strike you as rhyming in a weird way with some previous experiences of Mr. Nunes bringing documents from the Hill to the White House back in 2018, when they were actually documents from the White House that had been brought to the Hill, and theoretically, but not in fact, providing evidence that the Mueller investigation of the president hadn't been properly predicated; but it wasn't the same thing. 

It was staffers from the HPSCI coming over to the White House to study classified documents belonging to the HPSCI. But they didn't bring the documents back to the HPSCI either—

Meadows was making copies of some of the stuff for himself, and others for Kevin McCarthy (who seems to have turned them down, and others for "individuals in the private sector". 

The "private sector" was the journalism sector, or putting it more precisely The Federalist, as represented by Mollie Z. Hemingway; "Don Solomon" is plainly a transcription error for John Solomon, the Giuliani confederate in the long campaign to slime Hunter Biden, who has a history of offering backup to Hemingway, and also Trump's "representative", with none other than Mr. Kash Patel, for "access to the documents", including classified documents, that he stole from the White House in [checks notes] December-January 2020-21. 

And what Cassidy Hutchinson is telling us, under Cheney's prompting, is not just in general what documents those were, but how they were stolen!

I mean at least some of them (I'm with Cassidy Hutchinson's claim that some of the classified stolen documents were PDBs, expecting that they were appropriated, as I've said, for the uses of Jared Kushner), but I've been trying to figure out how Kash Patel could have stolen classified materials from the Defense Department without getting caught, and what we're starting to find is that they were actually stolen from the House Intelligence Committee, a place Devin has stolen from before, when he was the committee's chairman, and where Kash spent a major part of his career as Devin's dogsbody.

They weren't any use as propaganda tools, as I could have told them, since Democrats never actually did anything illegitimate to expose, but that's plainly what the Republicans wanted them for. And that clearly is what Republicans have been wishing to happen from the 2020 campaign onwards, and what the Mar-a-Lago documents madness was all about.