The DOJ is obviously in total disarray. Joyce Vance wrote about the latest cock-up:
Judge Aileen Cannon forbade it. There would be no release of Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, the part that dealt with the discovery that Donald Trump kept classified documents, some at the Top Secret/SCI level, when he left the White House. When Smith testified before Congress, he carefully tailored his responses to avoid violating the court’s order
But not so much the Trump White House. In what appears to be a sloppy but serious error, the administration released a document to Congress that MSNOW’s Carol Leonnig and Jacqueline Alemany reported on yesterday. They write, “In a January 2023 ‘progress memo’ reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held on to many documents related to his businesses.” Although the document isn’t publicly available, it sounds like the sort of reports agents and/or prosecutors might prepare for supervisors. This one contains some fascinating details.
The document was released as part of a regular document production DOJ has been making to Congress in support of the Republican inquiry into Smith. House Judiciary Democrats put it like this: “This particular production contained a memorandum detailing non-public information about the classified documents Trump stole when leaving office. The newly produced materials offer a startling view of evidence gathered by Special Counsel Jack Smith during his investigations into the criminal activity of President Trump, even as DOJ continues to suppress Volume II of his final report.”
L.O.L!!!
They are just so bad at everything.
Vance points out that the crimes Trump was charged with don’t require a motive. The statute says that prosecutors instead have to “prove to a jury that Trump unlawfully possessed classified information and willfully refused to return it to the National Archives when asked to do so. But prosecutors don’t have to establish why the defendant did that.”
Still, they knew that jurors would likely want to know why. (I wouldn’t be that interested because I think Trump just wanted to keep stuff for his own purposes which could be anything. His mind is very disordered.) However, Vance is right that people would be curious.
Smith and co. thought the documents indicated they might be useful for Trump business interests. I don’t doubt it.
Vance continues:
The reporting so far doesn’t reveal precisely which Trump business interests are involved, but Raskin engages in some educated speculation in the letter, which involves a classified map Trump had. “Without access to Volume II of the Special Counsel’s final report or the investigative files, we do not know what that classified map contained, nor can we determine from this memo the relationship between the classified documents President Trump stole and their pertinence to his ‘business interests,’” Raskin acknowledged. He continued, however, “We do know that around the time of this flight to Bedminster, President Trump was entering into partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and state-linked real estate firm Dar al Arkan.”
The flight is one where Trump allegedly showed others the map in question, and Raskin notes, “A month after this flight, in July 2022, President Trump played golf at Bedminster with Yasir al-Rumayyan, head of the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—the same official who plied the Trump family with tens of millions of dollars as the family began to run out of money between terms. During this trip, President Trump defended his business partners from criticism levied by the families of 9/11 victims protesting the Saudi government’s role in the attack.” Raskin say that in this time period Trump boasted about having maps and said “that it was only the hawks who wanted to attack Iran, not him, and that he had Pentagon war plans ‘done by the military and given to me’ about such a potential attack.”
Now think about that in the current context. WTF? Does Donald Trump ever do anything in foreign policy that isn’t designed to help America’s adversaries? Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, they always benefit from his decisions. America and out allies, not so much.
The Pentagon is considering whether to divert weapons intended for Ukraine to the Middle East as the war in Iran depletes some of the U.S. military’s most critical munitions, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Although a final decision to redirect the equipment has not yet been made, the shift would highlightthe growing trade-offs required to sustain the U.S. war againstIran, where U.S. Central Command has hit more than 9,000 targets in just under four weeks of fighting.
The weapons that could be diverted away from Ukraine include air defense interceptor missiles,ordered through a NATO program launched last year in which partner countries buy U.S. arms for Kyiv, the three people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the Pentagon’s sensitive deliberations.
Trump is gleeful at the prospect of handing Ukraine to Russia, obviously. He literally hates them because Rudy Giuliani convinced him that they were behind the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”
Meanwhile, we’re threatening to do the exact war crimes Russia has been committing in Ukraine, making Putin the big winner in all of this.