Where are the documents “in Trump’s possession”?
Former President Donald J. Trump’s attorneys are torn. Whether ’tis nobler to cooperate with a Department of Justice that believes Trump still has government documents “in his possession” or “to maintain a more combative posture” with all the legal slings and arrows pertaining thereto.
Here’s the rub: the Department told Trump’s lawyers it believes Trump has “not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House.”
The outreach from the official, Jay I. Bratt, who leads the department’s counterintelligence operations, is the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Mr. Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents the former president was supposed to have turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term.
It is not clear what steps the Justice Department might take to retrieve any material it thinks Mr. Trump still holds.
For starters, how about an indictment for obstructions of justice already committed? “Use your leverage,” as The Donald himself instructs. You or I would already have been cuffed, fingerprinted, and softened up for cooperation.
The press devotes a flood of column inches to investigative delays preciptated by legal wrangling between the Department, Trump’s attorneys, and a couple layers of Trump-appointed federal judges. But the matter everyone dances around is this:
The government has found more than 300 classified documents in material that had been kept at Mar-a-Lago, including some marked as containing the most sensitive information that would cross the president’s desk.
But the Justice Department has previously signaled doubts that Mr. Trump had turned over everything in his possession. Shortly after the search in August, it was revealed that federal investigators had found dozens of empty folders at Mar-a-Lago marked as containing classified information. The disclosure raised further questions about whether the Justice Department had indeed recovered all the classified materials that may have been taken out of the White House.
The empty folders were found during the search of Mar-a-Lago along with 40 other empty folders that said they contained sensitive documents that should be returned “to staff secretary/military aide,” according to a court filing. Agents found the empty folders along with seven documents marked as “top secret” in Mr. Trump’s office. Investigators also found 11 more marked as “top secret” in a storage room.
Brat is in counterintelligence. His interest is not simply helping bespectacled federal archivists complete their checklist of Trump administration records.
The phrase “in his possession” crops up repeatedly in these missing document stories as though his possession is a given. Ryan Goodman of Just Security points to the dancing elephant in the room.
What if Trump no longer has the missing documents “in his possession”?
Yes, Trump is rumored to have retained classified and national security materials to show off to his buddies or just to make the ex-president feel more important by having them. But if so, why the empty folders? Has Trump “actually lost control of the missing documents” as Goodman speculates?
“Lost control” is perhaps a euphemism for something worse that no one wants to say out loud about a former Grifter-in-Chief with solvency challenges.
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