As Conover Kennard recently reported, Donald Trump sure looked like he was trying to distract us with the release of about 80,000 documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “There was no word about the Epstein files, though,” she noted.
Nevertheless, in typical huckster fashion, Trump pretended he had made a bold move that other presidents had been too timid to make. “I said, ‘Release.’ We even released Social Security numbers, I didn’t want anything deleted,” Trump bragged. “They said, ‘So what about Social Security?’ People long gone.” He went on to claim that he released the Social Security numbers because otherwise people would claim he had hidden “something in there. … So, we gave Social Security, we gave everything.”
Well, it turns out not all the Social Security numbers belonged to people “long gone.” At least one Trump crony is very much alive and ticked off.
The New Republic explains:
One of them, Reagan-era Justice Department attorney and Trump’s own former campaign lawyer Joseph diGenova, was furious about the release of his personal data. “I intend to sue the National Archives,” he told USA Today. “They violated the Privacy Act.”
It’s not surprising that diGenova absolves Dear Leader of blame, even though he supposedly supervises the National Archives. You may recall diGenova was a key player in the flap that led to the ouster of Shepard Smith from Fox News. It arose after Smith defended a Fox legal analyst who was attacked on the air by diGenova after opining that Trump had committed an impeachable offense.
However, national security lawyer Mark Zaid noted just what a s**t show this was: USA Today reported, “The purpose of the release was to inform the public about the JFK assassination, not to help permit identity theft of those who actually investigated the events of that day,” Zaid said. “This decision was completely avoidable and either reflects intention or incompetence." It's also illegal for the government to release individual's sensitive information without their consent, USA Today pointed out.
According to USA Today, Zaid also said he “saw a few names I know and I informed them of the breach.”
