FBI document case: Trump wouldn't know a nuclear secret from Victoria's Secret

If you steal a gun, it doesn’t matter whether you intended to shoot anyone with it. You still stole a gun.

So on its face, the theft of government secrets and the refusal to return it to the rightful owner is something that would land you or me in prison for a long, long time. But you or me didn’t get 74 million votes two years ago.

Maybe just to prove that the far-right doesn’t have a monopoly on wild conspiracy theories, the left is bubbling with all sorts of ideas of what the former president “intended” to do with the boxes of government documents he squirreled away on his exit from office.

Maybe he was going to blackmail the president of France. Maybe he was going to sell nuclear secrets to the Saudis. Maybe he and Vladimir Putin had some backroom deal originating from a secret meeting in Helsinki.

But maybe he didn’t intend to do anything with them at all. The papers were thrown in boxes along with golf balls and a razor the way we might throw a pair of broken scissors in the junk drawer. If he had assigned value to them, it seems as if he would have put them under lock and key himself, without waiting for federal agents to force him to do so.

To a top detective, this would smell more like someone holding on to a souvenir or a curious seashell found on the beach.

If that’s the case, why the panic? Why did the government come swooping down on Mar-a-Lago, knowing it would touch off a political firestorm?

Flash back to a meeting of NATO ministers in Latvia last December, when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken basically presented our allies with the Russian playbook on Ukraine.

Blinkin was careful to say that we did not know for sure what Russia was intending to do, but nine months later it certainly appears that we did know for sure. We knew the where’s and when’s. We knew the troop numbers. At every turn we outed Putin’s intentions — like his plan for a false flag operation to justify his attack — before he had a chance to pull them off. In December 2021, there must have been some severely sharp words inside the Kremlin as we were able to telegraph Putin’s every tactic.

At first, NATO didn’t believe us. Even Ukraine itself didn’t believe us. But we were able to produce concrete evidence, apparently, so that when Russie did move, everyone was ready.

President Biden was able to unite NATO so that, much to Putin’s surprise, Russia was gobsmacked with the sanctions that are playing an ever more serious role in isolating this terrorist regime from the rest of the world. So too did Ukraine know the very route Russian troops would take on their invasion, and were able to block its primary convoy almost before it started.

Remember that Putin and China’s President Xi had just declared themselves BFFs on the eve of the war — but China’s involvement has been curiously restrained. Russia has begged the Chinese for help that has largely been with symbolic gestures only.

What both Russia and China seem to realize is that we have intelligence capabilities that they did not know we had. Whether human spies or, more likely, hacking technology, we have an advantage that is of critical importance that we don’t want to lose.

And might a cataloging of those capabilities be exactly what’s been sitting in an unsecured cardboard box next to the water softener in the basement of Donald Trump’s glorified speakeasy — where at least two foreign spies were left free to wander about?

Do you think the government might want to have those boxes back? And go to any means to get them, even if it left MAGA blowhards spouting about a civil war?

What’s more, it seems plausible that Trump himself didn’t even know what he had. We all want to ascribe to Trump these great powers as a cunning tactician. But that’s not who he is. He’s a grifter and an opportunist, the stooped little man behind the curtain masquerading as the Great and Powerful Oz. He wouldn’t know a nuclear secret from Victoria’s Secret.

There are stories out there that Trump was caught on security tape entering the room where the boxes were kept to riffle through the contents. That makes perfect sense. He was probably hunting for whatever it was that the feds felt was so all-fired important. Because he had no clue.

This obviously would be the least satisfying outcome to the left, which wants to see Trump locked up. But it would fit the pattern of a man too incompetent to carry out criminal schemes, whose actions never warrant imprisonment because they are simply too pathetic.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Trump probably didn't know what was in government files at Mar-a-Lago