Can we just get on with it?
We keep getting teased that Donald Trump will soon be wearing an ankle bracelet over charges in one or another of the criminal investigations pending against him. So far, nada.
Seriously, are we going to have to go Ralph Kramden on Jack Smith’s Ed Norton? (A very old cultural reference, sorry.)
Again Monday, nada. CBS News:
Attorneys representing former President Donald Trump — John Rowley, James Trusty and Lindsey Halligan — met with special counsel Jack Smith and federal prosecutors at the Justice Department at around 10 a.m. Monday, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The meeting took place weeks after Trump’s lawyers had requested a meeting with top federal law enforcement officials. The attorneys for the former president spent just under two hours inside the Main Justice building and declined to comment on their meeting as they left.
Trump himself, increasingly anxious under his Swords of Dumbocles, is freaking out in all caps on Truth Social, as Digby noted Monday. Most notably, over Smith’s investigation into the classifieds documents Trump squirreled away at Mar-a-Lago when he left the White House.
In classic fashion, Trump denies any wrongdoing and whatabouts six classified documents Joe Biden retained inside his home and others in his garage after his vice presidency. Those Biden voluntarily turned over to the FBI when they were discovered. Plus, additional Biden papers “mostly from his years in the Senate, which are housed at the University of Delaware, his alma mater — and which the FBI has indeed been allowed to examine,” Eugene Robinson notes.
Any president or vice president might “inadvertently end up with a few documents that should have gone to the National Archives under the Presidential Records Act,” muses Robinson. But:
What is hard to understand — and, to my mind, illegal — is for a departing president to deliberately take thousands of documents that belong to the American people, including some classified at the highest top-secret level, and then spend over a year obstructing efforts by the Archives and Justice Department to retrieve those papers.
Now, if you or I had done that we’d already be wearing an ankle bracelet unless we were behind bars. Does anyone think otherwise?
According to a 2021 recording obtained by special counsel Jack Smith and first reported by CNN, Trump bragged to guests at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club about having a secret document relating to Iran. According to news reports, Trump expressed a desire to share the information with others but acknowledged he shouldn’t do so because the document was classified.
If the tape is as advertised, Smith may have no other choice than to issue a felony indictment, if not several. Smith’s other ongoing investigation is about Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection for which multiple Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been convicted of sedition.
Trump : toast, former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks commented Monday evening with a pin.
Robinson cautions against gleefulness:
Do not be joyful at the prospect. It is sad that a former president might soon face federal charges of mishandling classified information — or worse. It is sad that a former president already faces state charges of falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to an adult-film star. It is tragic that a former president might soon face more state and federal charges for trying to overturn the result of a presidential election.
May justice be done, without fear or favor. And may the nation never again entrust such power and responsibility to such a small, craven, supremely unworthy man.
But lest Americans’ faith in equal justice erode any further, can we just get on with it?!