Trump played “hide the Top Secrets” with the F.B.I.
Someday someone will make a satirical movie about the debacle of the Trump presidency. Only the debacle won’t end with his presidency. It spills over into his post-presidency. Fitting all the episodic Trumpish lunacy into a three-act structure will be as challenging as knowing what to leave out. Presuming the Trumpish dictator then controlling the White House permits it.
As today’s episode unfolds, we find that the still-president-claimant has been hiding national security documents from the F.B.I. in his office at Mar-a-Lago. The Department of Justice photo of them strewn across his carpet is all over the internet. The court filing released on Tuesday indicates that Trump’s attorneys are citing court cases that apply to sitting presidents as if they apply to Trump now. And why not? Trump thinks he is rightfully still president.
Former president Donald Trump and his advisers repeatedly failed to turn over highly classified government documents even after receiving a subpoena and pledging a “diligent search” had been conducted, leading to an FBI raid of his Florida home that found more than 100 additional classified items, according to a blistering court filing by federal prosecutors late Tuesday.
The filing traces the extraordinary saga of government officials’ repeated efforts to recover sensitive national security papers from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club, centered on a storage room where prosecutors came to suspect that “government records were likely concealed and removed … and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”
Trump obstruct justice? The hell, you say!
When law enforcement authorities returned to Ma-a-Lago with a search warrant earlier this month, they found more documents Citizen Trump had no business possessing. Not to mention the non-secure manmner in which he kept them. This included in his desk drawer along with “two official passports, one of which was expired, and one personal passport, which was expired.”
Note:
Among the most incriminating details in the government filing is a photograph, showing a number of files labeled “Top Secret” with bright red or yellow cover sheets, spread out over a carpet. Those files were found inside a container in Trump’s office, according to the court filing. A close examination of one of the cover sheets in the photo shows a marking for “HCS,” a government acronym for systems used to protect intelligence gathered from secret human sources.
The 36-page filing also reveals, for the first time, the text of a written assurance given to the Justice Department by Trump’s “custodian of records”on June 3. It says Trump’s team had done a thorough search for any classified material in response to a subpoena and had turned over any relevant documents.
That would be, in layman’s parlance, a lie.
Prosecutors’ court filing puts it more delicately. That the August search turned up 100 additional national security documents, prosecutors say, “calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.” The list of statutes Trump has violated grows by the day.
Marcy Wheeler has a lengthy thread on what’s contained in the filing. There is a lot there.
Trump, the man at the center of this investigation, used his Truth Social feed Tuesday morning to repost dozens of QAnon conspiracy theories before deleting them and posting more unsubstantiated allegations.
Americans gave that man, Donald Trump, access to the nuclear football. That man, Donald Trump, took classified materials from the White House and stored them in his office closet and desk drawer at his resort. Next to his framed Time magzine covers. And he demands reinstatement as president or a do-over election.
Update: Added link in photo caption to Washington Post explanation.
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