The more he gets away with it, the more they love him
That’s a relief. Otherwise keeping classified documents in a box in Trump’s office where anyone who works there could find them might be seen as a criminal act that should be prosecuted.
TPM points out that it might not be all that easy for Trump:
There are a few stubborn problems remaining for Trump, though.
First, given the opportunity, his attorneys have not claimed anything about him declassifying documents in any official capacity. (His team has put out media statements arguing without evidence that Trump had some sort of declassification “standing order” as president.)
For example, when they produced documents from Trump’s home in June, “neither counsel nor the custodian asserted that the former President had declassified the documents or asserted any claim of executive privilege,” prosecutors said in Tuesday’s court filing.
“Instead, counsel handled them in a manner that suggested counsel believed that the documents were classified: the production included a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, containing the documents.”
Trump’s assertion echoed a perfectly-timed “report” earlier this month from right-wing journalist John Solomon, who also happens to be one of Trump’s representatives to the National Archives, in which Trump’s office asserted that Trump had a standing order as President to basically telepathically de-classify all classified documents when he took them home from work. But no one else at the White House seems to remember such an order.
More bad news for Trump: The classification status of the documents isn’t actually the issue.
Rather, it’s that he had any government documents at all in his home post-presidency — when he is a regular private citizen like anyone else – and, also, that federal investigators seem to think an effort was made to hide that fact.
In June, one of Trump’s records custodians – believed to be Christina Bobb, one of Trump’s lawyers and former One America News Network host – signed a letter stating that a “diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida,” and that Trump’s team was, at the time, handing over everything they’d found. (Recall this is more than a year after Trump left office.)
But at the time, according to prosecutors, Trump’s counsel prohibited investigators from opening certain boxes in a Mar-a-Lago storage room.
And, now that the raid produced more sensitive documents at Trump’s home, prosecutors wrote Tuesday of a likely alleged obstruction attempt.
“The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the filing read.
The magical mind declassification gambit is truly silly but he’s going to stick with it and there are people who think that’s all it takes. It doesn’t get him off the hook legally but politically it works for the rubes. Dear Leader deemed everything declassified and that’s that.
It’s a neat trick because if the documents are truly sensitive, which some seem to be, they cannot be publicly revealed even if Trump says they’re declassified because a) they aren’t really declassified and b) it would be dangerous. So Trump can just say that they were no big deal and that he declassified them and it’s all good. He can even lie about what they contain and the government can’t do much about it.
Apparently, there is such a thing as a “goldilocks” document which is a classified document that won’t reveal important intelligence information but can prove to a jury that it was dangerous to take them (“juuust right.”) They run into this frequently in national security cases. So maybe they can do something like that. But that’s assuming they indict Trump which I suspect they won’t. They will determine that the documents were mishandled and he put the country in danger but that there’s no evidence they fell into the hands of any adversary so no harm no foul.
If that happens, he will once again be shown to be teflon and secure the admiration and worship of Republicans even more. To them he is a superhero for thwarting every single attempt to stop his lawbreaking.