A top Justice Department official told former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the department believed he had not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Michael Schmidt, Maggie haberman and Katie Benner, New York Times, October 6, 2022

In response to this reporting, on Thursday’s edition of “Deadline White House with Nicolle Wallace,” former CIA director John Brennan suggested the National Archives does not know what other documents are missing. I recognize it takes a lot of chutzpah to contradict a former CIA director. Nor have I ever had access to classified government files. But Brennan’s assessment is much like the situation where a school teacher asks students to raise their hand if they are absent. In other words, would the missing documents please identify yourselves.

I believe both the National Archives and the Department of Justice know exactly which documents are still in the former guy’s possession. In the course of researching my novel, much of the information I needed pertaining to the civil rights movement, organized crime and national security in the 1960s came from unclassified documents in the FBI’s Central Records System (CRS), all of which were available in the FBI’s digital library “The Vault.”

Think of CRS as the agency’s version of the Dewey Decimal System on steroids. Every document is marked according to a numerical structure consisting of three numbers. The first relates to the subject matter. For example, classification 62 was a catch-all covering “Miscellaneous Subversive and Non-Subversive Activity.” Over time cases filed under this classification were reassigned to other more specific classifications. It still contains all cases related to organized crime.

The second identifies the case. All FBI files related to Al Capone can be found at 62-24153. As each new document or piece of evidence is added to the file, it is stamped with an identifier consisting of classification-case-order of entry.

Among the earliest documents in the Capone folder is an October 16, 1930 memorandum to director J. Edgar Hoover from the deputy director verifying the name of a Capone associate. It has the ID number 62-24153-24. An October 20, 1930 update from the acting special agent is Chicago is identified as 62-24153-25. If the second memorandum were missing, there would be an easily identifiable gap between 62-24153-24 and 62-24153-26. While I do not know this for a fact, I imagine classified documents generated by other agencies within the U.S. intelligence community, e.g. NSA or the CIA, have equally stringent standards, if not more so.

So, when DOJ and the Archives suggest there are missing documents, they likely are employing the same techniques the FBI uses when it recovers money obtained through ransom demands or bank robberies. If the loot includes new bills, a review of the sequential serial numbers will tell you exactly how much has not been recouped. Think of government files as sequentially numbered 20 dollar bills.

Which raises the following question. What is still being withheld and why was it not recovered during the FBI search of Mar-A-Lago? On August 21, 2021, Reuters reported, “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.” Based on the House Select Committee hearings and evidence in the opening days of the Oath Keepers trial on charges of seditious conspiracy, there is no lack of tangible evidence of an “organized plot.” If so, why couldn’t the FBI find it in August 2021?

There are two explanations. Either no effort was made to gather the information. Or the information was removed from the FBI files. Keep in mind, in May 2021, FBI director Chris Wray told multiple congressional committees that domestic terrorism was the fastest growing threat to national security. Yet, three months later, his agency had no evidence of an organized conspiracy to violently overturn a presidential election?

Which raises the final question. Once the former guy realized DOJ was pursuing return of government documents, did he want the headlines to focus on those related to nuclear secrets? This misdirection makes sense only if there is more damning evidence of other personal criminal behavior. You know, like seditious conspiracy. Consider the following report in the Washington Post on January 12, 2021.

A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document.

Devlin Barrett and Mat Zapotosky

The internal document from the Norfolk field office includes the following.

An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.

For the former guy, sharing national security secrets was a grift to endear himself to wealthy autocrats who had previously funneled money to his businesses or he hoped would continue to do so once he left office. Evidence of his active participation in a seditious conspiracy is about spending the rest of his life in prison or exile.

My guess is the still missing documents might be identified by combing through CRS classification 100, “Domestic Security.” Originally created in 1944, CRS 100 dealt exclusively with organizations associated with Russia and communism. In the 1970s, the agency’s focus included “new left” organizations such as SDS. Based on the number of post-January 6th prosecutions, the number of cases under CRS 100 is extensive and growing. But is it as complete as it once was?

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP