Bonkers Adminstration: People Had To Follow Trump To Tape Together Shredded Documents

Donald Trump apparently rips up every document
he touches, so somebody has to tape them all
together for National Archive records. I should
have invested in 3M, makers of Scotch Tape

As is obvious to (almost) everyone, we live in bonkers Trump world now. One in which he basically wants to start a way with Canada of all places, yet thinks Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un  are pretty much A-OK.

These mega issues are overwhelming, so I sometimes seek out the smaller, but even weirder absurdities in Trump World.

Politico recently had a doozy on this score.

When Trump finishes with a paper document (remember, he tends not to read them) he tears them into tiny shreds. The problem is, he's not supposed to.

As Politico points out, under the Presidential Records Act, the White House is required to preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches. All the paperwork goes to the National Archives for safekeeping and to eventually become historical records.

So what they do with the shredded papers? For a period of time, it was the following, says Politico:

"Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape (Solomon) Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, 'like a jigsaw puzzle.' Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti."

Presumably, somebody is still taping the ripped documents together, or at least I think so. But Lartey, 54 and his colleague Reginald Young Jr., 48, were abruptly shitcanned from their job. They were stripped of their badges and hauled off the White House grounds by the Secret Service, Politico reports. 

Nobody, as far as we can tell, knows why they were fired. This includes Lartey and Young, who were not told why they were fired.

Politico tried to get ahold of the woman who fired them, but she didn't respond to their emails. Neither did a White House spokesman.

My theory, of course, is Lartey and Young were preserving documents that Trump doesn't want preserved. That just seems to be his M.O.

The insanity goes on........

Did NSA Pick The Wrong Congress Person To Fight With?

Some people love him. Some people hate him.

My guess is U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt isn't
finished with the NSA quite yet.  

But almost everyone agrees that when Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, gets into a battle, he doesn't let go.

So it will be interesting, to say the least, now that the National Security Agency has basically blown off Sanders when he asked whether the agency spied on any member of Congress.

First of all, I get it that we have to spy and gather intelligence pretty intensely on our terrorist enemies, and I understand that work can get murky, messy and shady. I accept that. Somebody's got to do the dirty work, and that's the NSA's job.

However, it does seem the NSA has gotten a bit carried away, spying on anything that moves, it seems. And what do they do with all that information anyway? They don't seem like the most trustworthy bunch in the world, after all.

The Snowden leaks seem to indicate the NSA pretty much obtained information on everybody, and probably a lot of their work was illegal.

But hey, laws, schmaws. I'm sure the James Bond wannabes at NSA are having a grand old time collecting data on boring emails and phone calls.

I'm criticizing the NSA here, so I half expect their agents to show up at my door even before I finish writing this post, so they can arrest me for daring to complain about them, or something. My computer and cell phone are probably bugged now, too.

Oh well, if the NSA wants to read my boring emails about normal winter weather in Vermont, let them.

Anyway, the latest bit of trouble for the NSA came last week, when Sanders decided to make an inquiry. According to the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, here's what Sanders asked:

"Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?....Spying would include gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not available to the general public in the regular course of business?"

The good news is the NSA got back to Sanders pretty much right away. The bad news is, they didn't answer his question. Again, like or hate Sanders, you'd think a government agency would have a little more respect for a Congress person than that, just kind of blowing him off.

Here's part of the NSA's response to Sanders, according to the Free Press, which received this statement from an NSA PR person:

"NSA's authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. pesons.....Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons."

The NSA also said it is still reviewing Sanders' letter.

Well, that's surely a non-answer. Sanders didn't ask for WHICH members of Congress had been spied upon, if any. He just wanted to know whether it happened. The NSA could have protected privacy by answering Sander's question with a yes or a no, and leaving Congress people's names out of it.

So, reading between the lines, I guess the NSA's non-answer to Sanders is a yes, that they have been spying on Congress.  Some members of Congress, including Sanders, have not said kind things about the NSA, so maybe the agency is annoyed with them, and so maybe they are spying to get the dirt on them?

We may never know, but I bet Sanders will try to keep finding the answer. As I said he doesn't give up very easily.

Yeah, yeah, I know some of this is political posturing on Sanders' part.  But I love watching a good battle, and the one between Sanders and the NSA is going to be a good one, indeed.