I don’t think it’s very clear at all what the significance is of the government move to recover highly secret documents that Trump removed from the White House, apparently illegally, and kept lying around unsecured, apparently also illegally, scattered in different places in his Florida golf club.
Two questions that I think have yet to be addressed are: why the FBI is acting now, as opposed to, say, a year ago; and why Trump is aggressively trying to suppress the investigation, instead of saying, “Whoops. Sorry. I had no idea. Take everything back.”
The “now” part may be purely random, although my experience is that it’s a mistake to make this your go-to explanation.
What comes to my mind: a little more than half a century ago (ouch!!!), I was a soldier in Vietnam, in the mountains in the northernmost part of then South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese military strategy back then was to control key territory by building elaborate bunker/tunnel complexes, incessantly rehearse how to defend these fortifications …and wait for some unwitting foe to come within striking range. Among other things, this negated most of the technological advantages US troops had.
To avoid premature detection by ARVN or US forces, communication in these complexes was mostly through telephone lines. When we found such lines, we would tap into them and listen to the traffic. We’d know we’d been discovered through one of three cues: traffic became inane, traffic stopped completely and/or a large patrol began to walk the line, looking for breaks.
My worry is that this sort of discovery cue has been triggered with the Mar-a-Lago documents–say, one or more sources have gone silent, or are suddenly offering disinformation, or have disappeared. And the idea that this implies that top secret information in Mar-a-Lago documents has already (recently?) been sold or stolen is what has sparked the FBI search. The anger/ferocity of Trump’s response, and his vilification of the FBI, suggest he’s reading the search the same way I am.
In any event, this is the story I’ve made up to explain this situation. The only thing left to do is to monitor for evidence either for or against the hypothesis. I’m not sure what stock market consequences follow from confirmation, other than it would be a huge black eye for the entire MAGA agenda. So, bad for industries of the past, like fossil fuels.