In a story dated December 7, 2022, "Rolling Stone" discussed at length the fact that attorneys for TRAITOR Trump had turned over to the FBI at least two government documents with classification markings which had been found by those attorneys or their staff during a search of a storage unit rented by TRAITOR Trump near his Mar-A-Lago property. This story also appeared in nearly every other national news paper and on all the major television news channels when it was released to the press. As all of you know, after more than a year of unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with TRAITOR Trump for the return of all classified government documents in his possession, the Department of Justice finally had to obtain a search warrant for Mar-A-Lago and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of documents which belonged to the US government were retrieved by the FBI. Many of those documents were classified at the highest security levels in use in the American intelligence communities meaning that they were supposed to never leave secure facilities and never to be viewed outside the most secure viewing rooms. I am sure that many of you actually believed that was the end of that as far as his possession of illegally obtained and retained government documents was concerned. I would suggest that this return by his attorneys of two more documents in a rented storage facility justifies the service of search warrants on every property TRAITOR Trump has owned, rented, or visited since at least January 20, 2017. The possession of each of those individual documents justifies an additional separate felony charge for illegal possession of classified material. The possession of these documents and the year long refusal to return them to the government after the National Archives learned of their existence most likely also justifies charges of espionage. But, when Special Counsel Jack Smith does make the move to indict and charge TRAITOR Trump it is highly unlikely that the incredibly large number of possible felony charges will be levied against him. What is most likely to happen is that Special Counsel Jack Smith will build a half dozen to a dozen rock solid cases on the most important charges with the possibility of a few lesser charges to leave room for plea bargains.
But what I really want to discuss here is the existence of such documents in a rented storage facility which was an unbelievably danger location for them to have been illegally stored and shows the ultimate level of disrespect by TRAITOR Trump for the value of the classified information contained in those documents. I want to discuss this location of the documents from the unique viewpoint of a licensed and experienced auctioneer. I have held an auctioneer license for many years in Kentucky and was also licensed for a few years in the neighboring state of Indiana. I have conducted several hundred auctions during those years and I have also conducted numerous auctions of the contents of unpaid storage facilities. For a period of several years, I also regularly bought and resold the contents of unpaid storage facilities in the eastern half of Kentucky, parts of Southern West Virginia and the Cincinnati area. During that time I customarily bought the contents of three or four storage units a week and resold the individual items in my auction house. During that time, I admit that I never found classified documents in an auctioned storage unit. But I did find nearly every other form of personal and confidential papers in those units. Examples would be marriage, birth, death, divorce, and military discharge papers; parole papers; and many other forms of highly personal documentations of nearly any imaginable life event. First and foremost for those of you who have seen even one episode of any of the popular cable television auction shows, let me tell you in no uncertain terms those shows do not represent the reality of either the broader auction business or the specific business of selling the contents of unpaid storage units at auction.
So let's talk about the specifics of the sale at auction of the contents of unpaid storage units. As we start this discussion, I am certain many, if not most, of my readers will say "but Donald Trump would never face the sale of his storage unit contents for non-payment". You are dead wrong if you say that. Even Fox News, which is usually the most clearly biased major reporting agency toward TRAITOR Trump, reported in a June 2016 article that "Dozens of Law Suits Accuse Donald Trump of Not Paying His Bills..." One day before the Fox News story, USA Today also published a nearly identical story about TRAITOR Trump not paying his debts to hundreds of contractors at his various businesses. Four years later, as TRAITOR Trump was about to leave the White House for good, the website northjersey.com reported on a long standing problem of unpaid bills at his New Jersey casinos. What these stories, which are just three of the dozens of such published stories, tell us is that TRAITOR Trump has a long standing history of not paying his just debts. So, you say, "what does that have to do with classified documents in a storage facility near Mar-A-Lago"? As a licensed and experienced auctioneer, I can tell you that this has everything to do with the level of risk to the US government and the US intelligence community and presented a vastly increased level of that risk because of what happens when ANY RENTER of a storage unit anywhere in the United States fails to pay that rent on time. All storage unit owners single source of income is the rent of units and they do not tolerate nonpayment of the rent. Also, in nearly every state, those storage facility owners are both regulated and protected by laws covering how they can and must conduct the sale of such contents. But in many states those laws are incredibly vague and nowhere near airtight. In most cases, the facility owner must have proof of the unpaid debt and proof of a reasonable attempt to contact the owner of the stored materials about the need to pay that debt. In some specified amount of time, the property in the storage unit reverts to ownership by the storage facility and its owners. Then, in the most ethical storage facilities, the owners contact a licensed auctioneer and contract to have the contents of any unpaid units sold at auction. In some states, the renter is allowed to pay the debt up to the scheduled time of the sale. In others, the time to pay the debt is much shorter. The most ethical auctioneers will advertise the upcoming sale in a local medium such as the print newspaper and hold the auction on site at a specified date. The most ethical practice to sell those contents involves keeping a lock on the doors of the units until the moment of the sale at which time the facility owner unlocks each unit, opens the door, and the auctioneer allows the potential buyers to briefly view the contents from outside the unit without ever going inside touching anything in the unit. When the auctioneer accepts bids, pronounces the contents sold to the highest bidder, and the bidder pays for he unit, that bidder owns everything in the unit and the sale is irreversible. What that bidder subsequently does with the contents is then nobody's business except theirs. But there are also unethical facility owners who sometimes open the units on the sly and view and cream the contents for the most valuable items and removes them for their own collections or private sales. Additionally, most of the buyers of unpaid storage units are regular sellers in venues such as flea markets, yard sales, auction houses, used furniture stores, or variety stores. Almost none of those buyers have any personal interest in anything they buy and sell. It's a matter of making a profit. Any item in any storage unit anywhere in America, if that rent is unpaid, can be bought by any stranger who appears at the time and place of the auction with enough cash to buy a unit's contents. And, if you think TRAITOR Trump would always keep the rent paid on a storage unit, you are an incredibly naive human.
Simple non-payment of rent is not the only possible precipitating action or inaction which can result in the sale of storage unit contents. Owners also often die suddenly and TRAITOR Trump is an elderly obese man who is also distrustful enough of everybody he knows that he may well never tell another soul about any or all of his properties, their locations, and any regular bills which must be paid to protect those assets including a rented storage unity in which he most likely new he had stored illegally obtained government secrets. It is not unusual at all for the heirs or executors of deceased storage unit renters to fail to learn about the existence of such storage before the unpaid rent prompts the sale of the contents. The level of risk presented by those classified documents having been in a rented storage unit is incredibly high and far more than high enough to justify Special Counsel Jack Smith to obtain search warrants for every other facility which TRAITOR Trump has controlled, owned, rented, or stayed in since January 20, 2017. And that is exactly what Jack Smith and the Justice Department should do.
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