YEAH, BUT HILLARY'S EMAILS TO MACRON....OR SOMETHING...:

Everything we've seen since Monday suggests that the usual attempts from Trumpworld to poison the well ahead of bad news haven't been working. There has been nothing that could counter the simple fact confirmed on Friday: Donald Trump is under federal criminal investigation.

Among the dodges Trump offered up Friday is that the material recovered "was all declassified." It's the same argument that former Trump appointee/stooge Kash Patel used in May. He told Breitbart that classified documents then-recently recovered from Mar-a-Lago had actually already been declassified. Trump "declassified whole sets of materials" before leaving the White House," Patel claimed, but, he said, White House counsel Pat Cipollone "failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn't mean the information wasn't declassified." (Experts think that it may mean exactly that -- and as NBC News reported on Friday, "the three laws cited in the search warrant do not specify that the mishandled documents had to have been classified.")

While Trump as president did have the authority to unilaterally declassify most items, there are some major exceptions to that rule, including those related to nuclear weapons. And on Thursday evening, The Washington Post issued a bombshell report alleging that among the documents the Department of Justice sought were "classified documents relating to nuclear weapons."

Attorney General Merrick Garland's announcement that the DOJ would move to unseal the warrant and receipt list had already rocked Republicans by undercutting their claims that the department wasn't being transparent. But The Washington Post's reporting prompted an almost eerie silence from the right on Twitter for hours Thursday night. When Trump attorney Christina Bobb was asked on Fox News about the report, she offered up a less-than-rock-solid defense. Bobb said that she had "not specifically spoken to the president about what nuclear materials may or may not have been in there. I do not believe there were any in there."

Her hesitancy became slightly more understandable Friday when the receipt list she'd signed Monday was unsealed. The three-page list does not detail the subject matter of the documents seized. Instead, it merely lists how many sets of documents were recovered at each of the four levels of classification -- confidential (3 sets), secret (3), top secret (4), and "various classified/TS/SCI documents" (1). (TS/SCI stands for "Top Secret/Secure Compartmentalized Information," meaning that access should only be available to specific officials with need-to-know clearance and viewed in highly secure environments.)

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