 Yeah, espionage at Mar-a-Lago. Here in American Issues, take one. I'm joined by Cynthia Sinclair. I'm Jay Fidel, and this is Think Tech Hawaii. So today we're going to talk about Mar-a-Lago. Very interesting is that the distractions distract us from the distractions. And we have all these investigations going, half a dozen of them, and each one seems to, you know, displace the other. It's a displacement thing. And it's like the old pail of water. You know, if you throw a pail of water onto a full pail of water, you wind up with half a pail of water because the second pail displaces the first. And so it's hard to say, it's hard to connect the dots when you have all these issues and investigations and reports of criminal activity by Donald Trump. So today we're going to examine, to the extent we can, what happened at Mar-a-Lago and what may happen or will happen going forward. First thing I want to do is play a Think Tech commentary that I found on our intraact between shows. So will the engineer, Eric, will you please play that now? Aloha. Thanks for your consideration of the views expressed in this Think Tech commentary. This commentary is entitled, Indictments Coming Soon, No Defense, No Excus. Why did Trump steal classified nuclear secrets? He had no right to do that, but he did. It's not the same thing as the furniture, artwork or silver. Classified top secret nuclear documents, that's another thing. What he did is indigable and unforgivable. Just as for the January 6th insurrection, the evidence against him on this is already clear. He improperly took them from the White House without justification or excuse and in violation of the criminal laws relating to espionage and obstruction and the handling of classified documents. The average citizen or military member would be in jail by now. Trump then obstructed the transition of these materials to the incoming Biden administration, further undermining our national security. He refused to turn them over and he and his lawyers lied about them. When the DOJ and the FBI finally got a search warrant, sure enough they found the documents in Trump's residence at Mar-Largo. Incredibly, but consistent with past machinations, Trump then attacked the DOJ and the FBI for having obtained and executed the warrant. He caused his followers to violently attack the FBI in Cincinnati, and they now threaten further violence against the intelligence and law enforcement agencies in our country, claiming that these agencies are enemies of the state, just as he claims the press is. His unhinged GOP legislators have made ridiculous comments, like nuclear doesn't mean nuclear, and that Trump somehow magically declassified these documents without indicating that he had done so. You bet there's an indigable crime here. Actually, there are multiple and very serious crimes. Shooting someone on Fifth Avenue is one thing, but what Trump has done is worse. Our national security has been jeopardized. Trump has willfully and intentionally disregarded the law and the rule of law, as so many times in the past. He must be held accountable, and that means he must be prosecuted and punished just like anyone else who violates the law. For the good of the country, he cannot be above or exempt from the law. He is not a victim. Okay, I'm joined by Cynthia Sinclair as Cynthia Lee Sinclair, a major contributor here on American Issues Take One, and I want to ask her her reaction to at least what we saw of that animation and of the state of affairs now as to Mar-a-Lago. Okay, well, we know that the things that were put forward in our onto act are exactly accurate, and so there's all these questions that we have that are unanswered, right? Like, why did he do it, and why did he hold on to some of them? And that's like, to me, one of the biggest things. When the archive people went down there and they retrieved the first 15 boxes, why did he hide those other 20 plus boxes? And now that we know that there were top, top secret, the top of, you know, top secret documents that were in those boxes that he did not turn over in the original thing. So all of his claims of they could have had them any time they wanted. They didn't have to do this, you know, Nazi raid or whatever, Gestapo raid. I would have just handed them over. And that talking point is being just reiterated over and over and over on Fox News. And from reporting, we know that's what's on OAN and Newsmax and all those other ones also. And every Republican that can, that's what they're trying to push to, they didn't have to do this big Gestapo raid, see that Democrats are weaponizing the Justice Department. Projection, the very thing that Trump was doing is to think they're accusing the DOJ of doing now, which is ridiculous. And so this is the thing, he kept those. Why? And aren't the Saudis on their way to derail? The Saudis that gave the Trump family $2 billion? Yeah, for a start-up. What a great laundry. Exactly. And $2 billion is not even close if they're giving them secrets. Now, I was looking on some news recently and going through some of the things that happened, right? So first it was they killed Khashoggi. Okay, well, we're all looking at that. While we're looking at that, was it Ron Johnson that was trying to do a secret deal to do some kind of nuclear sharing with the Saudis? But that sort of fell through. But they still want that material. So look who brought it home with them. How convenient. And now they are at his golf course. There's all this stuff on social media that are questioning just exactly what got buried in Ivana's casket these days. Because the timing is so bizarre and that, you know, all of it is so bizarre. And we know, this is the thing, the bottom line that we know, Trump cannot be trusted. 30,000 lies, more actual court cases against him than any other American ever, not just, you know, other fair, you know, politicians, but any American has never been charged this many times with different different crimes across the board from business to politics to personal everywhere. So we already know we can't trust him. So why do some people do it? Maybe you know, Jay. This is really funny that before Trump was elected, I talked to a guy that I knew in the State Department, I said, gee, this is going to be awful if he wins. And he said, don't worry, Jay, if he wins, he'll be impeached. You know, but that's not good enough. You have to have the trial and you have to have him convicted. And it's been twice and it could be, you know, if he was still in office, it could be a third time and a fourth time. And how far are we going to go with this impeachment business, where we know the story, we have all the facts down. And we have, you know, only some members of Congress who get it and other members oppose it no matter what. This is really an illness and it's a fatal illness as far as I'm concerned, as you know. But you talk about the Saudis and, you know, I really believe the Saudis are somehow involved in some kind of quid pro quo with Trump for those nuclear plans. But I also worry a lot about Vladimir Putin. Because remember how friendly he was with Vladimir Putin? Remember how he was more friendly with their emissaries than he was with the FBI and the CIA and our intelligence community. He was laughing in our intelligence community. Remember how he tried to undermine and corrupt the FBI, even in the first month of his term, way back when, it's in the book and movie by James Comey and so many other books and movies that have come out in the past four or five years about his fascination with Russia. Remember the Bob Mueller report that, you know, somehow William Barr scuttled. You know, he's been tied to Russia for all these years trying to escape, you know, the obvious connection that these investigations have shown. Mueller warned us about that. Remember, in his closing remarks, he warned us. I mean, it's really right at the center of our national security. And I think we have to understand that Trump has a strange brotherhood with Vladimir Putin. And, you know, you and I have discussed this before. And when it really gets hot, he's going to go to Russia and find comfort there with Vladimir. And he'll escape that way. Meanwhile, he's feathering his nest. In my view, he's feathering his nest, making some money, a lot of money, maybe, by compromising national security. That's why he took these files, especially the nuclear files. What would Vladimir Putin be willing to pay or Xi Jinping? What would they be willing to pay to take a look at those nuclear files? Trillions, Jay. Trillions they would pay. And Russia, if I might just add in here, is already putting out ads on their state TV that they've already seen it. They've already seen those files. They've already looked at them. That's what they're saying in Russia right now, on Russia's state TV. Now, whether it's true or not is another story, if it's just being said so that they can cause an uproar over here in America, or if it really is true, we don't know. To me, it's entirely possible. And I think, why else would he have taken? Can you scan the questions that came out of Sidney Blumenthal's article in the memo I sent him to you and pick out some of the good ones? There's a lot of unanswered questions here. And this investigation, we've only seen the very top of the iceberg. There's all kinds of documents involved. And the affidavit that Merrick Garland doesn't want to give us. And he's right. He shouldn't. There's too much information. And it'll be a roadmap for Trump. But there's all kinds of things that we don't know about. And what troubles me is that, as I said, it's a layer cake of distractions. And there are other distractions that have happened since that time that put this lower on the stack. So while it was big news a week or two ago, it's not such big news anymore. What exactly is happening? We hope and pray that Merrick Garland is not dropping a ball on this. We hope and pray there's going to be an indictment. There's no reason from what we do know for there not to be an indictment. Anyway, what are the unanswered questions? Some of the ones that- Well, there's a bunch of them. And I think that one of the important ones is number three. Did members of Trump's Secret Service Detail have knowledge of his secret storage of the files at Mar-a-Lago? And what was the relationship of the Secret Service Detail to the FBI? Did the Secret Service or any agent disclose information about the files to the FBI? So was it maybe a Secret Service person? Was it just somebody that works there? Was it an aide? Was it who knows, right? We don't know. We have to take that in the context of the Inspector General. Did you see this? The Inspector General of the Homeland Security Department just yesterday, I think it was, said that he was not going to cooperate, not going to respond to process, not going to turn over any of the text message materials of the Secret Service. And he's a Trump appointee. I don't know why he's still there. I'll say it again. I do not know why he's still there, as I do not know why Louis DeJoy is still there, as I do not know why James Murray is still there. Trump appointees and the test, the metric was whether they were loyal to the end of time to Trump. Anyway, he refused to turn over anything. And the Secret Service is controlled by Homeland Security. And we know that Homeland Security under Wolf, you know, before the end of Trump's term was really, it belonged to Trump. Really hideous arrangement and corrupt. Just like, you know, Trump was trying to corrupt every agency. Anyway, so I don't know. I don't have any feeling about the Secret Service, except to say that the Secret Service is buying for a destructive appeal, this distraction appeal right now. So which one is the top of the heap? And I do not have any confidence in them at all. They have never spoken about what happened to the missing text messages. The Homeland Security and this guy, this Inspector General, has never spoken about what happened to the text messages. Why would they have been helpful to the American public, to the country, you know, back in the day, they were they belong to Trump. So it's not clear to me what their role was, you know, at the time of last summer, last few weeks, at the time of the subpoena. So I have a question about whether or not the Secret Service ever is a witness in a case ever about things. Now the FBI, if it goes court, they will have the FBI come in and testify. Does the Secret Service ever testify? I don't know if they ever are they like... I don't know, but I can tell you that they have no privilege. They have no legal right to refuse to testify. Or does the Inspector General of Homeland Security have a legal right to blow Congress off? Anyway, so, you know, that means to me that's very provocative that you talk about and this guy Blumenthal raises the question of the role of the Secret Service, you know, in the Attorney General, that Merrick Garland's attempt to get these documents, the FBI's attempt to get these documents, it remains that they haven't said anything publicly about it. It remains the Secret Service hadn't said anything. And I do not believe the Secret Service has mentioned in any of the documents around this search warrant that have actually been made public. We don't know who Deep Throat was. We need to find out, but I guess one of the reasons that Merrick Garland doesn't want to reveal that is that it would destroy the source. And furthermore, Trump would unleash its minions, his proud boys, on whoever blew the whistle. It doesn't even need to be a proud way to just be any crazy Republican, right? I mean, there's just too many of them. What happened in Wyoming yesterday, and I know we're going to talk about that tomorrow, but it's just a perfect example of the insidiousness of his lies and misinformation. And it's been going on for so long now. And why we talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect, and people want to brush up against people that are powerful so that they feel like they're more powerful, even when they know it's going to be illegal, or if it's something that's not right, or if it's something even that might hurt them down the road, they don't even think about that. They think about that raised level that they're going to get from that connection. But there's a book that was written, gosh, way long ago, in maybe the 80s, I should have looked up exactly when. It was called The People of the Light, written by a Christian educator named M. Scott Effect, who was brilliant. And in this book, and I'm going to try and just condense it down into a couple of sentences here. So I really recommend to get the full effect that people read this book, right? And he makes the contention that the evil person and true evil is not the person that robs the liquor store down the street, but the person that cannot admit their own faults and mistakes. That is the definition of true evil in his mind and to his debate that he puts out there. And boy, I'll tell you, I'm a believer and I've seen it over and over and over. And I wonder if that isn't part of what's in here too, is that these people can't admit that they made a mistake. They can't admit that they were wrong to choose to follow this horrible man. They can't admit that maybe they had that judgment when they made that decision. They may think that somehow it reflects badly on them for making the decision to begin with, so they would rather just go all in. And I think... It's very hard to understand. And you and I and the others on American issues have been speculating on what that might be from a psychological or sociological standpoint. And we still can't... We don't come close to understanding it. We certainly can't justify it. We can't analyze it. But let me say that I am so troubled by this one because this involves national security. It involves the holy of the holies. This is the core of the country's security, the core of it. And we do have enemies out there and we have to protect ourselves. We spent trillions for the military to do that. And the guy at the top of the heap is essentially playing with our nuclear secrets. And P.S. during his term he had the football, the button, the bomb, he had it under his control. And he's a madman. Everybody knew he was unhinged and everybody knew the 25th Amendment. But you use the word mistake, Cynthia. And you can say that the people who follow him, who are his acolytes, they made mistakes. And indeed, in the larger sense, they made mistakes. But he doesn't make mistakes. He knows exactly what he's doing. He didn't... Like this one Republican said, oh, he was just working at home. You guys work at home, don't you? You take your briefcase home and you take some papers you're working on and you bring him home and you work on him there. What a crock. Boxes and boxes, dozens of boxes that he took home. Give me a break. That's not working at home to the extent that he works at all. I mean, it's been very clear that he can't read very well. Or if at all, so what is he taking him home for? He didn't take him home to read him, to work on him, and he didn't take him home by mistake. He took him home intentionally, and he took him thousands of miles away from the White House. Did he really have to do that? He's all the staffers around him. He could have... You know, he spent 140 days of his presidency, four years. That's 480 days altogether. 140 days at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, did he really work at all? And then, of course, take nuclear secrets, take all these highly classified, top-secret, compartment documents. I mean, if he had been in the military and moved those things around, I can tell you, he would have been in jail immediately, in jail. And his career would be over, of course, as a person who went to jail. Officer Roy listed all the same. That's the law. And so here's a guy who does this, and the law doesn't reach him. And I hope Merrick Garland continues on with this, because it's very troubling to me that we had this spurt of news attention a couple of weeks ago. And now it's like off the front page. If you look the front page right now, you don't see any references to this. There's other things. There's other things that he's done, all the investigations, the prosecutions and Giuliani and subpoenas for other people in his club. And I find it amazing that this seems to have fallen off the side. And is that Merrick Garland's fault? Whose fault is that? Are we going to forget about it? Are we going to let other distractions distract us from the distractions? I mean, if this goes away, it is truly an injustice. We have to find a way to follow these things. That's one of the things I like about talking with you, Cynthia, we do follow them. We don't forget them. Well, you know, the news media, just like the MSNBC and CNN and PVC and PBS, those guys have not forgotten about it. They start every newscast. Each person that sits down, they start their newscast with news of this. So I don't think it's totally gone out of the headlines. I watched all of the main news channels like CBS, ABC and NBC last night, and they all led with this also. But you see what's happened, Cynthia. It started out with nuclear secrets, top secret, compartmental, top secret, highest possible. What is it called? CSI type documents. Okay. And now that's not the issue. You see what's happened. It's been turned on its head. Now it's whether Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice and the FBI have abused their discretion, whether they have violated the law. That's what the issue is. And it's, of course, the nutcases who are out there attacking the FBI and the Department of Justice. It's turned on its head. Trump has essentially turned it on its head. We're not looking at him anymore. Now the spotlight is on the people who, you know, including the judge who issued the warrant in the first place. He's under attack. And by the way, that's an anti-Semitic attack. So the whole thing comes together as attacking the attacker. You had a name for that, the projection. It's the projection. It's reversing the attack. And so to extend there's news about it, think about it. The news is all about whether the Department of Justice did something wrong, which is a crock. I have not heard that at all on the mainstream channels and on CNN, MSNBC, BBC and PBS. I didn't hear any of them say that. As a matter of fact, I heard and CBS and ABC also, I didn't hear anyone say that. I did hear them say that OAN and Newsmax are saying that. I did hear them say that they, I mean, they came out with Vice President, Vice President Pence came out and said, but you know, he was dual the way he said it because he said, now, Merrick Garland has to answer for his, the charges that he's brought. But the FBI should be left alone. They don't have anything. I heard him say that and that's what I'm talking about. He says the Department of Justice has to be accountable. Wait a minute. What about the guy who violated every rule in the book, every statute? The guy who violated our national security and our nuclear secrets. What about him? They don't talk about him being accountable. They talk about the DOJ being accountable, which is ridiculous. I'm worried about the fact that media never says this man has no business being president ever, before or after. And nobody says that. Nobody. And we got one John Heilman who, whenever he comes on, he introduces him as the disgraced, twice impeached, coup-plotting. I forgot he added a couple new ones for this morning. But and that's how he introduces them all the time. But he is the one and only and he is not a regular MSNBC host. He's just sitting in for Nicole Wallace. So I think, well, maybe he feels like he can get away with a little bit more because he's not an official host. But I'll tell you one thing. I don't hear one single person on any of those channels or in the times either or the Washington Post say that. And I don't understand why. Oh, they said it and said it and said it. It got tired. You know, that's part of the news cycle. You say it over and over and then you can't say it anymore. You've got to find new news, which is the problem that I'm describing in terms of the layering of distraction. You know, the new news comes. Everybody wants to hear about that. So you go to that and you forget what you were talking about. You get distracted. The other major thing, I think, and to go to your point, Cynthia, that we don't fully understand and the press doesn't really make us continually aware of it is this. When Trump was in office starting with Comey, he tried to corrupt everybody, tried to require their loyalty to him instead. You know, and he did. He did do that. And he made a lot of appointments for senior officials in his administration and throughout the old ones and unceremoniously. In the case of Comey, he threw them out while the guy was on a trip in California. And he didn't even give the transportation back to Washington. He left them there. In McCabe, which is the second... Two days before he was in retirement, which is just an outrage for a guy who's spent his whole life serving the country. And what I'm saying, though, is that the people he replaced them with were all loyal to Trump. They swore loyalty in the same way Trump had tried to get these other guys to wear loyalty. So that means if you go through a list of all the appointees that Trump made through four years of government, especially the higher level guys like William Barr, they are not at all loyal to the country. They were only loyal to Trump. So when they get up and testify, when they write books and articles and make these pronouncements about what happens, you have to look at that through the lens that they replaced somebody who was loyal to the country. They were not loyal to the country. They were loyal to Trump. And they remain loyal to Trump right through the end. And PS, for some of them, like that inspector general like James Murray, like Louis DeJoy, they're still in office. And the only metric not confidence and not loyalty to the country is loyalty to him. I mean, he has corrupted the whole federal establishment in that way. Thank God that Merrick Garland and the DOJ and the FBI could go as far as they have, but query can they go all the way? Yes, well, who knows. And I want to just make one more point on the on the media and their involvement in all this. They have said from the beginning and still to this day, today, they spout every newscast, it seems they spout that he's still in charge of the Republican Party. Instead of forming it or framing it as it's crazy that this man is in charge of the Republican Party or it's wrong or he shouldn't be or any of that, they just give it to him and they've done it from the beginning. And I guess what in the name of being nonpartisan, I don't really know, but it's not in the furtherance of truth. And that's what makes me mad. And I'm really upset with the news media these days for that. They're not standing up for truth. And that's their job is to find the truth and stand up for it, not to be nonpartisan and play tiddly-winks with everybody. That's not their job. Their job is to find the truth and report on it. And they're not doing it. And that's what makes me mad. Well, let me take that one step further because we really have to cover what is going on in the Republican Party about this warrant. You know, there are phony, baloney excuses. It seems to me that too much of the media report the excuses as if there might be some truth. It's like when Trump makes a statement, they're into a knee jerk. The president told a falsehood as follows. But they don't say that the Republicans told a falsehood as follows that he was taking this work home to work on it in Miralago. That's ridiculous. But they don't say it's ridiculous. And so if you hear it over and over again, you get the feeling that, well, maybe there was something behind that. Or he didn't mean to take it. You know, that's ridiculous. But you got to say that it's ridiculous because it is so obviously ridiculous that it needs the press to make that statement, to characterize it appropriately. Or that, you know, it's okay for him to take all this because he magically declassified, right? The magic declassification, you know, in the military, and they have a lot of nuclear secrets in the military. If you want to declassify anything one page, you have to go through a tremendous protocol. You have to destroy it. You have to send a letter of destruction with multiple signatures. If you want to add another page, you have to go through a similar protocol. I mean, any one page, here this guy has dozens and dozens of boxes of high classified information, nuclear secrets and the like, no record whatsoever. And these Republicans actually get up there and say, well, you know, he has the power to declassify without any protocol at all, no record, not even a statement to anybody. And that is absolutely ridiculous. But the press doesn't say that is a ridiculous statement. They don't and they never have it saying that because otherwise the issue with the issue is twisted. It's the whole thing becomes whether the DOJ acted properly, whether the judge acted properly, whether the FBI, that's not the issue. The issue is why were these boxes in Trump's residence when it's against the law for him to have removed them from the White House. We don't have a clue about that. And it's now, now, Cynthia, it's mum, you know, whatever happened at a flash of publicity. I don't know what's going to happen here. What do you think is going to happen here? Well, I think that the media has given the Republicans that still support him cover to support him by not being specific. And I think that truth has been devolved and destroyed into opinion. So there's no such thing as truth anymore. There's no facts don't matter. Because of lies or lies, they're all lies. There's no truth. There is no truth. Truth has become opinion and lies and lies. And that's why well, because opinion, everybody's got one, right? I mean, come on. That's not the same thing as a fact or truth. An opinion is just an opinion. It has nothing to do with truth or lies, right? It's just an opinion. There's truth and there's lies. Opinion shouldn't be anywhere near either one of them, because they should be cold hard facts or not facts. And that's I hold the media responsible for that. And unless the media, I don't, you know, I don't know how we can, I know we get, we get right raw with all the truth and the facts and not just the opinions. We tell our opinions as opinion. And then we try to present the facts. And every single other media personality should be doing the same thing. And there's no excuse that they're not. I don't understand. And unless there's a change, I'm sorry. I don't have a lot of hope for where this is gonna go, because they're giving cover to all these Republicans that want to believe that Trump is a good guy and want to believe that they didn't make any mistakes. They want to believe that they weren't wrong. They're not screwed up. They didn't make a bad choice. No, no, no. The guy's still awesome. And we made the right choice. And if the media keeps giving them cover, nothing is going to change. There's no blue wave that can save us here. There's already eight states that have interference election laws on the books. So we're in, we're in dire straits right now. And the midterms may well be our last chance to save democracy. And I'm not even sure if we can do it. If the media doesn't get on to the truth and start doing their job, instead of, you know, presenting everyone's opinion, they should be doing nothing else. But finding out what the truth is, and then reporting on the truth, get rid of opinion completely, right? Instead of saying, well, this guy said this and this guy said that gotta give everybody a, you know, an even time to save their opinions. No, they don't. They don't have to. They can kick them all off and say, if you don't have facts, cold hard Fox facts, get off my, you know, channel, go to Fox. They don't care about Okay, we're out of time, Cynthia. Very interesting discussion. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope we can discuss this more up this more information coming down the pike. I wouldn't want it to slide off the side. Cynthia Lee Sinclair, this is American issues. Take one. We will see you very soon. Cynthia, like for American issues, to where we'll discuss American issues, take two tomorrow, tomorrow, where we will discuss Liz Cheney and what happened there and what will happen with her going forward. Thank you so much. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.