There is every indication that the suspected theft of several boxes of highly-classified documents by Donald Trump and his closest aides bears Trump’s personal imprimatur. Had anyone other than the computer-averse Trump wanted to sneakily spirit away such a large amount of paper documents when they would have merely copied them to a small thumb drive and encoded the files with a commercial encryption product. That does not mean that the FBI could not successfully retrieve such documents pursuant to a court order but the presence of some 27 boxes of classified documents in a storage room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Florida estate provides an insight into the simple mind of Mr. Trump. And therein lies the possible smoking gun that prosecutors may use to show that Trump stole classified documents for personal gain, including financial arrangements with hostile foreign governments.
What may eventually involve Trump and others in his personal circle in a major espionage case is that the documents stolen by Trump, either the originals or copies, bear a printer steganographic code, also called a Machine Identification Code (MIC), that is discretely included on every page. These steganographic codes can be grids of yellow or secret dots. They identify on which printer or copy machine every classified document was produced. This forensic trail follows every copy of a classified document even those which are shredded or flushed down a toilet.
U.S. intelligence agents around the world are always on alert for the trafficking in compromised classified U.S. intelligence documents. It would not be surprising if the initial tip off that classified documents stolen by Trump and transferred to Mar-a-Lago later turned up in places as varied as Moscow, Beijing, Donetsk, Jerusalem, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, or Beijing. Like marked U.S. currency, the classified documents and their MICs could be traced back to what U.S. official possessed them and when. It makes sense that the Department of Justice or FBI would not want to provide too many details on the forensic trail that led them to search Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. CIA agents in the field may be tracking additional purloined documents and any revelation by U.S. law enforcement that they are tracing specific documents back to Mar-a-Lago might cause the current possessors of the documents to burn or otherwise destroy critical evidence.
In December 2019, classified US-UK trade documents were leaked to the website Reddit. The leak came a few days before the British general election and were seized upon by the opposition Labor Party as proof that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Conservative government were planning to privatize all or part of the British National Health Service. Britain’s National Cyber Security Center, a component of the GCHQ signals intelligence agency, set out to examine the MIC markings on the classified documents that appeared on Reddit. The Johnson government never identified where exactly the documents originated.
In 2017, federal prosecutors were able to trace a classified National Security Agency document leaked by NSA contractor Reality Winner to “The Intercept.” The date and printer used were identified by law enforcement investigators by the MIC that appeared on the copy of the document. Although the document proved Russian interference in U.S. elections, the Justice Department prosecuted and convicted Winner for leaking national security information.
Trump’s avoidance of miniaturized storage devices to cover up his theft of classified documents may be his undoing. For someone like Trump who is known to avoid writing anything down, it is a paper trail that may end up sending him not back to the White House but to a federal “big house.”
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and nationally-distributed columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
