Whose fingerprints are all over this?
Donald Trump and his legal team can’t seem to decide whether to claim that the top secret classified documents found in his home were planted there by the FBI, or that Trump declassified them on his way out the door. The latter won’t hold up at all, because some of these classified documents are the kind that the President can’t unilaterally declassify. As far as the notion that the evidence was planted there, that’s not going to work either.
One analyst on CNN has pointed out that when documents this sensitive are stolen and recovered, they’re tested for fingerprints to see who all might have touched them. This fingerprinting will presumably include the boxes or file folders that the documents were stuffed into and carried in, and so on. In other words, this is going full CSI.
So whose fingerprints are going to end up being all over these documents and boxes? We’re about to find out. If Trump and his people were so lazy and careless as to stash boxes of classified nuclear secrets in a basement or closet, then they surely didn’t bother to take steps to obscure their fingerprints.
It’s possible that some lower level Mar-a-Lago employees were instructed to stack the boxes without knowing what was in them, and their fingerprints will show up on the boxes. But in such case, those employees would surely rather just testify about who told them to stack the boxes, than go to prison for espionage. And if the fingerprints of any of Trump’s political associates show up on these documents… we’ll see.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report