Slight correction, before aliens should be:
- It was Eric
- It was Jr
- It was Ivanka
- It was Obama
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He probably used the classified documents as padding for the framed covers, because they aren’t wrapped in paper or bubble wrap or anything.
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"Over the last 18 months Trump consistently resisted engaging in any of the statutory processes designed to deal with disputes of this kind. He and his representatives didn’t make a case that he was entitled or allowed to possess these documents. He tried to hide the fact that he had them at all. "
(from TPM, link is not paywalled.)
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Eeehhh on the hardcopy from a user’s perspective. I’ve lived those worlds and some paper is accountable - meaning a semiannual or annual pain in the buttocks to manage. We went from >3k paper accountable docs to only two over a few years’ effort. It was glorious. My inventory became “yup, those two are over here and over there”. And none in my house or on my glorious rug.
Now for historians, digital stuff is probably a nightmare. Or perhaps a trove - we did some trials of “deep search” stuff on our servers and it was, ahem, interesting.
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That’s the best comeback the GOP has?
“But what about all the stuff in that photo that’s not incriminating?”
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There are not enough words for how much I loathe this piece of shit.
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Ever try to flush a photo?
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As a historian, paper has a known track record of lasting, which in my line of work, matters. If you want stuff to be around for a long time (which, maybe peopl don’t care, but we’ve now seen what not understanding the past gets you), then you use hardcopies. This is why we train archivists - to deal with the organizational effort involved. We really do need to get out of the mindset that what is good for business is good for everything, because it’s not.
And, yes, as a historian I am a “user” of hard copies in archives. But I guess my years spent doing research is, once again, unimportant. 
It depends. My biggest complaint with the internet archive is the difficulty in finding what I need. The interface is not intuitive for non-tech savvy people. It is critical that everyone have easy and ready access to information.
And of course, any and all content that is ONLY stored digitally and on a single server can be pretty easily wiped out.
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But is the carpet…dank?
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The Narcissist’s Prayer
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
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Several of the dates are barely legible in the photo
Wednesday 9 May 2018 adorns the document with the folded over cover sheet
The other is August 2? 2018 or 2019 but it’s only confidential.
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For the most part, I don’t think that he had any great interest in the information that was on these documents. After all, it is pretty well established that he doesn’t like to read. But the more other people bother him about getting documents back, the more he realizes that they value them. And so he becomes ever more convinced that he should not “give them his documents.” So it’s “If you want it, you’ll have to give something in exchange.”
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I suspect that these are unlikely to be on lignan-free archival paper. A century from now they’re likely to be dark brown vanilla smelling brittle piles of “paper.”
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Heh - we (cynically) have a tradition of “don’t write it down, so you can reinvent it ten years later”.
I do worry about where info goes, not classified in this case, but mundane things like calibration certificates and training records. When I queried our records folk on stuff like that all I got was shoulder-shrugs. I’d posit a question like “so on month/day/year this thing was accepted - how do we know?” Crickets… I’d mention that there are federal regulations on this stuff, that the US gov pays for, and yet more crickets.
And paper and research is valuable! We recently found a document, written by some safe-cracking wiseass in Los Alamos, maybe 1943/1944, that predicted/estimated what was needed for some safety things just now being used in the stockpile. Our dude here is ace at finding these things - it turns out that nothing is new… And as a historian you might be amused that we have, in the basement of the ad building, some patents that even the USPTO doesn’t have. Yeah, there’s a patent on the bomb…
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The carpet looks like pretty standard issue “mid-range hotel conference centre” to me, which says a lot about Former Guy. He’s cheap, unoriginal, and commercial. Mar-a-Lago must be like a Best Western with a view.
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I have to disagree. The assumption when someone steals sensitive secret documents is that they have an interest in them.
In this case either because they implicate him in other crimes or because he could monetize them.
Or both, of course.
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The important investigation on this has already been concluded:
https://twitter.com/richardcheese/status/1564839255918096384?s=21&t=hWwSU0IrClp-vrXL-P8LNw
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I have been reliably informed by the patent office that there is no such thing as a secret patent. There are, however secret patent applications. Of course that was back before the US changed to a “first to file.” system for patents, so keeping a secret application around might not be as effective as it once was.
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