The Soviets were big on purging anyone who deviated from the party line (and quite a few who didn’t) and the Russia loving MAGA freedom fighters are doing the same. They are making their requirements clear and it now goes even beyond total fealty to Donald Trump:
Republican delegates in North Carolina voted Saturday at their annual convention to censure Thom Tillis, the state’s senior U.S. senator, for backing LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and gun violence policies.
As Sen. Tillis has gained influence in Congress for his willingness to work across the aisle, his record of supporting some key policies has raised concerns among some state Republicans that the senator has strayed from conservative values.
Several delegates in Greensboro criticized Tillis, who has held his seat in the Senate since 2015, for his work last year on the Respect For Marriage Act, which enshrined protections for same-sex and interracial marriages in federal law.
Both the state and national GOP platforms oppose same-sex marriage. But Tillis, who had opposed it earlier in his political career, was among the early supporters of the law who lobbied his GOP colleagues in Congress to vote in favor of it.
Others criticized him for challenging former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and for supporting a measure that provided funds for red flag laws, which allow state courts to authorize the temporary removal of firearms from people who they believe might pose a danger to themselves or others.
The North Carolina senator initially opposed Trump’s plan to use military construction dollars to build a wall along the nation’s southern border, but he eventually shifted his position.
Tillis spokesperson Daniel Keylin defended the senator’s voting record, writing in an email to The Associated Press that he “keeps his promises and delivers results.”
Don’t ever think that marriage equality (and, apparently, interracial marriage too) isn’t on the hit list. On Immigration and guns any deviation, no matter how small, is cause for expulsion.
This is just a warning. Tillis was re-elected in 2020. But he’s on notice that he will be o-u-t if he doesn’t straighten up and fly right — and so is everyone else in the GOP.
The *very reason* the Presidential Records Act was passed post-Nixon was to establish that presidential records belong to the government (the public) and not an ex-president.
Claiming the PRA says presidential records belong to an ex-president is a complete reversal of reality. pic.twitter.com/YjQcYKI9is
You’ll note in the previous post that his former lawyer says that a president has two years to decide what to return to the National Archives. Even if that were true it doesn’t mean that he gets to hold on to classified nuclear secrets and war plans and show them to people. Come on.
Trump is going to get new lawyers so we don’t know what kind of defense they will put up. But one of his former lawyers, who quit last month, says they will claim prosecutorial misconduct and complain that the Presidential Records Act gives a former president two years to give back highly classified documents that he’s storing in a bathroom at his beach club. Seriously. Here’s Watergate prosecutor Michael Conway:
Timothy Parlatore, an attorney who represented Trump until he resigned in May, recently predicted that Trump’s lawyers will file a motion to dismiss any indictment in the documents case based upon claims of prosecutorial misconduct. When defense lawyers level claims of illegal conduct by law enforcement to shift the focus away from their clients’ behavior, it can suggest the clients’ actions are increasingly indefensible. (The special counsel’s office declined to comment on Parlatore’s allegations.)
That’s a sign of desperation.
The alleged misconduct seemingly has at least two themes, at least according to Parlatore. First, he has asserted that the Justice Department’s successful efforts persuading a federal court to set aside attorney-client privilege claims were improper. Parlatore told CBS News that he was “stunned” when questioned in his grand jury appearance about information he says was protected by attorney-client privilege.
However, special counsel Jack Smith’s aggressive challenge to claims that Trump lawyers were shielded by attorney-client privilege from testifying and providing documents was upheld by a federal district court and affirmed on appeal. The attorney-client privilege assertion was rejected by the courts under the so-called crime fraud exception, which strips the privilege if communications were made in connection with possible criminal activities.
The fact that federal courts approved the questioning of Trump’s lawyers seems an impenetrable defense to any claim that this action constituted prosecutorial misconduct.
Second, Parlatore told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday night that Trump lawyers may have told Smith in a meeting on Monday that “misconduct committed by Jay Bratt and his team in bringing the [documents] case to this level” would be a reason not to indict Trump. At least some of that alleged misconduct, according to Parlatore, focuses on Justice Department counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt’s team’s obtaining a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago in August. Parlatore claimed that Trump, under the presidential records law, had two years to review documents shipped from the White House to Florida before being required to send presidential papers to the National Archives.
Once again, such a hypothetical misconduct claim falters because a federal magistrate judge authorized the search warrant. (And that warrant led to the discovery that Trump continued to retain classified and other official documents, despite his lawyers’ claims to have complied with an earlier subpoena for those documents.)
Parlatore explained that he was speaking out now to rebut public speculation that he resigned because of his own legal problems, statements that he told O’Donnell were “completely false” and “professionally damaging.”
While prosecutorial misconduct theoretically can result in derailing an otherwise appropriate criminal prosecution, this defense rarely succeeds. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1981 ruled that even when law enforcement engages in misconduct, “absent demonstrable prejudice, or substantial threat thereof, dismissal of the indictment is plainly inappropriate, even though the violation may have been deliberate.”
The respective merits — or lack thereof — of these potential defenses did not stop Trump from taking his legal theories to the court of public opinion. On Truth Social, he ranted about the behavior of the prosecutors, urging an investigation into many “ALL TOO OBVIOUS WRONGDOINGS & CRIMES TAKING PLACE AT DOJ & THE FBI.”
This post also (and unsurprisingly) seemed to be spreading a conspiratorial theory that Justice Department prosecutors tried to “bribe and intimidate” a defense lawyer representing a witness by offering the lawyer an “important judgeship.”
Trump’s reference resembled new claims made by Trump lawyers, first reported by The New York Times, that a federal prosecutor had “brought up” that lawyer’s municipal judgeship application, which Trump lawyers believed was a “veiled threat.” A spokesman for Smith had no comment about the incident.
Ranting on social media about alleged government misconduct is one of Trump’s favorite pastimes.
On one hand, ranting on social media about alleged government misconduct is one of Trump’s favorite pastimes. On the other hand, ranting on social media about alleged government misconduct will not get any indictment tossed out by a federal court.
Even though threadbare claims of prosecutorial misconduct have scant chance for success, the Trump legal team seems likely to press them. What other options do they have when the reported charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice, illegal retention of classified documents and violations of the Espionage Act seem so powerful?
While a good offense may be the best defense, a flimsy offense sends a message of impending trouble.
This. Is. Nuts. If that’s all they’ve got, in any normal situation Trump will be convicted.
However, Trump has his own personal judge overseeing the case, one who has no experience with national security cases, and I would not bet even a penny that this will be handled in a professional manner. It’s going to be a circus.
He had a reason for keeping those classified documents and it wasn’t for “show and tell”
It’s true, as always, that Trump is such a psychological train wreck that it’s not hard to imagine that he stuffed classified documents into boxes on the regular without thinking about it because he’s a disorganized mess. But that’s just too easy. There are other aspects of Trump’s personality that make it much more likely that he was thinking about making some deals.
This piece by Fintan O’Toole in the NYRB (subc. only) says it all:
Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality. He kept intelligence documents because, at some point, those secrets could be used in a transaction. What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason. He may not have known how and when he would cash in this currency, but there can be little doubt that he was determined to retain the ability to do just that.
Before the publication of the grand jury’s indictment, it was possible to believe that Trump’s retention of classified documents was reckless and stupid. The indictment reveals that recklessness and stupidity are the least of his sins. With Trump, it’s always a mistake to equate anarchy with purposelessness or to think that the farce is not deadly serious. Trump’s hoarding of official secrets is both breathtakingly careless and utterly calculated. At the heart of that calculation is a cold resolve to not give up the power that access to highly restricted information had given him.
The most immediately striking parts of the indictment may, in this regard, be something of a distraction. The photographs that show boxes of papers at Mar-a-Lago, piled high on a ballroom stage, in a bathroom, and spilling out onto the floor of a storage room, convey an almost comic sense of chaos. If comedy is generated by incongruity, what could be more incongruous than nuclear plans or details of “potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack” sitting beside a toilet?
It all seems random and haphazard, an impression greatly magnified by the knowledge that Mar-a-Lago, in the eighteen months after Trump took the documents from the White House, was, as the indictment states, the venue for “more than 150 social events, including weddings, movie premieres and fundraisers that together drew tens of thousands of guests.” The New York Times has published photographs, scraped from social media, of people in party dresses or casual summer clothes around the Mar-a-Lago pool. We can see that, behind them, the door that leads to the storeroom, which was packed with boxes of official papers, is wide open. In those boxes, when the FBI opened them in August 2022, were eleven documents marked Top Secret, thirty-six marked Secret, and twenty-eight marked Confidential. It would have been the least thrilling spy thriller ever made. No James Bond high-tech gadgets or George Smiley ingenuity—just turn up in a cocktail dress, slip through an open door, and help yourself to the US military’s contingency plans for invading Iran.
Yet this ludicrous vulnerability to foreign spies is both remarkable and somewhat beside the point. The slapdash storage of classified papers is shocking—but also misleading. It defines the scandal as, in the words of Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s indifference toward the country’s most sensitive secrets.” But this is not a tale of indifference. Trump cared a great deal about the value of the documents. He cared enough, per the indictment, to suggest that his attorney lie to the FBI and a grand jury about what papers he did or did not have. Even Trump does not engage in a criminal conspiracy purely for its own sake. The retention of those boxes mattered to him because he understood the market value of what they contained.
It is important to bear in mind that chaos is Trump’s natural element. It is the medium in which his narcissism thrives. When there is no plan, the only law is his own desire. He alone knows at any given moment what he will do. In this light, the apparent disorderly storage of the boxes at Mar-a-Lago does not signify a lack of concern with what they contained. It is just the norm of Trumpworld. Derangement is his modus operandi.
The indictment makes clear that Trump knew very well that he was breaking the law. He was repeatedly warned by the National Archives and Records Administration that if he did not hand over the missing records, he would be referred to the Department of Justice. He had, of course, made a very big point in his attacks on Hillary Clinton of the need for zero tolerance for any lack of rigor in the handling of classified documents. He fully understood that the laws applied to everyone, including the president. As he declared in September 2016, before that year’s election, “We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified.” As president, in July 2018, he issued a statement saying that “as the head of the executive branch and Commander-in-Chief, I have a unique constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information, including by controlling access to it.”
More specifically, Trump knew that he was taking huge risks when he allegedly instructed his lawyer to lie to the FBI and the grand jury. That lawyer, quoted in the indictment, recalls that when Trump told him to take a folder of documents to his hotel room, he made a silent “plucking motion,” as if to say, “if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” Precisely because Trump knew that he was committing a crime, he preferred not to utter the incriminating words. There is nothing thoughtless or accidental in all of this. He clearly believed that the risks were worth taking.
This does not suggest that he was holding these documents merely as souvenirs. It’s quite possible to believe that part of his motivation lay in his fantasy that he was still the real president: retaining the intelligence briefings he received as POTUS would make him still, at some level of self-delusion, potent. The two known occasions, cited in the indictment, when Trump produced some of the documents to outsiders while explicitly referring to them as secret and confidential have this air of showing off—perhaps as much to himself as to those he was trying to impress. It is also quite reasonable to think of him experiencing a tingle of pure pleasure in imagining his own impunity—knowing that he was committing the ultimate transgression and thrilling to the idea that he would get away with it because he had always in his life gotten away with everything.
But these elements of twisted psychology can coexist with a more rational impulse: to keep hold of secrets that could be traded at some point for his personal gain. Trump sees himself above all as a deal-maker: “The nation’s classified information” is a potentially lucrative part of one or many deals.
This intent would be treasonous. Trump may not have actually committed treason, but he was consciously putting himself in a position to be able to do so. For what is not secret is the identity of the foreign countries that would be most interested in acquiring the details of the military plans and vulnerabilities of the US and its allies. The indictment states that the documents also included information that could identify US agents and informants in some of those countries and “the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.” This is worth underlining: Trump went to great lengths to retain for himself, as a private citizen, the power to reveal to any foreign power not just US military secrets but the workings of US intelligence-gathering in those countries. It is impossible to believe that he did this accidentally or without considering that he might at some time use that power in return for some financial or other benefits.
Which makes it all the more astonishing that most of the Republican Party is fine with this. Much of the history of the right in America is bound up with paranoia about the possible existence of traitors at high levels of government. Here is stark evidence of the existence of one at the very highest level of government, and Republicans are rushing to defend him. The Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington famously asked, “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?” and answered, “For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.” If the hoarding of state secrets as valuable currency cannot be called treason, the concept has gone the way of honor, truthfulness, and respect for law. It has ceased to exist for the Republican Party.
There’s one country in particular who seems to me the most logical recipient since there have already been a couple of deals done. Here’s Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen saying it on TV:
“I think the DOJ should be, if they’re not already, [be] looking at the unholy relationships that exist between Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and Jared Kushner,” he explained.
“I mean, this whole two plus billion dollars to an unqualified hedge funder makes no sense to me, and in light of the information that came out, that there was military information on Iran, and we all know that Saudi Arabia has had with Iranian aggression on their mind for a long time — who knows what was shown to them? Who knows what was discussed? Who knows what was sold? None of us.”
Both Kushner and Trump have done some lucrative deals with the Saudis since they left the White House. Trump’s golf deals may be picayune compared to Jared’s but he’s always been planning on running for president and had to keep a lower profile. Whether these deals were for services rendered or services to come this relationship stinks to high heaven.
It’s also very possible that he thought he might need some help getting elected. We know he has no problem asking foreign leaders to do such favors for him. He doesn’t have any vital military equipment to blackmail them with but a few super classified war plans or Top Secret nuclear secrets might just sweeten the deal.
O’Toole makes a vitally important point here that I think isn’t often articulated. Trump thrives on chaos — “derangement is his modus operandi.” So it’s very foolish to believe that just because he’s a mess that it precludes the idea that there was a method to his madness.
Trump took those documents for a reason and it wasn’t just casual sloppiness. There were just too many very important national security documents in there for that. He had a reason and the most likely is that he anticipated doing something with them. This is the man who was known for his (ghostwritten) book called “The Art of the Deal.”
Once upon a time, Republicans wanted to learn to “speak like Newt.” Gingrich. These days, they might aspire to speak like Trump. Many have learned without a lot of trouble how to stoke stochastic terrorism with plausible deniability.
This is the post that Trump “re-truthed” that appeared right before the “lock, load, shoot” ad. pic.twitter.com/eF7qIWNjEc
Bill Kristol points to a Joe Klein article on how Trump’s close-up magic is done:
He has a preternatural ability to bend the law to the point of breaking, but he never cracks it in two. He never says to the January 6 crowd: Go on down to the Capitol and overthrow the government. He says to the Proud Boys: “Stand back and stand by.” Stand Back absolves him of a truckload of evil intent. Stand By means: ignore the first part. He is a genius at the micro-laser-slicing of baloney, tip-toeing the rhetorical tightrope. And if you want to charge him with something that isn’t a flat-out doozy: advantage Trump.
Don’t get cocky. Remember when they called Bill Clinton “Slick Willy”? He’s got nothin’ on Trump. He’s a master. And his followers will just brush off whatever he’s done. Because the facts don’t matter. And they just don’t care.
“In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”
True to form, the former president set out to rally his foot soldiers by branding Thursday’s 37-count federal indictment against him, for his actions, as an attack on them. That is, to personalize it.
“In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” Donald Trump told the convention of Georgia Republicans in Columbus, Ga. on Saturday.
Right. And I’m still waiting for Barack Obama’s jack-booted thugs to kick in my door and confiscate my guns, as I was promised over a decade ago.
The indictment is “ridiculous and baseless,” the most “horrific” abuse of power “in the history of our country,” so “many people have said,” Trump droned. “The Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice” has engaged in “vicious persecution,” a “travesty of justice.”
Blah, blah, blah.
“I will prevent World War III. … Without me, it will happen,” Trump told them.
The problem ahead is that Trump’s “fool me twice” Republican base is lining up once again to take seriously that only the man who stored nuclear secrets in a ballroom and a bathroom can save them. The subtext, of course, is Trump’s plea for them to save him.
The New York Times reports that experts fret that the inhabitants of MAGAstan will once again take to the streets and commit violence in Trump’s name:
Experts on political violence warn that attacks against people or institutions become more likely when elected officials or prominent media figures are able to issue threats or calls for violence with impunity. The pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was drawn to Washington in part by a post on Twitter from Mr. Trump weeks earlier, promising that it would be “wild.”
The former president alerted the public to the indictment on Thursday evening in posts on his social media platform, attacking the Justice Department and calling the case “THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME.”
“Eye for an eye,” wrote Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, in a post on Twitter on Friday. His warning came shortly before the special counsel in the case, Jack Smith, spoke to the public for the first time since he took over the investigation of Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents.
On Instagram, Mr. Trump’s eldest son’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, posted a photo of the former president with the words, “Retribution Is Coming,” in all capital letters.
Arizona’s imaginary governor, Kari Lake, spoke to the Georgia convention. She issued a threat against “Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden — and the guys back there in the fake news media.”
Lake told the cheering crowd, “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.”
She added: “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”
This could again go beyond fiery boasts. It did on Jan. 6. It did in Oklahoma City.
New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival is running through June 18th. The festival (co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2001) features a variety of media platforms, including film, TV, music, audio storytelling, games, and XR. I’m doing virtual coverage; as much as I’d love to be skipping down the streets of my birth city (well…technically Queens), physical mobility issues have made travel too uncomfortable. At any rate, I’ll be sharing reviews over the next couple weeks. The good news is that you can virtually attend as well-the festival is offering select titles via the “Tribeca at Home” online portal. Check out the website for more info.
Against All Enemies (U.S.) *** – In a post examining reaction from the Right when news broke this week that ex-president Trump was being indicted by federal prosecutors for alleged mishandling of classified documents, Digby included this disturbing tidbit:
Take this seriously. “Perimeter probe”: Higgins thinks indictment precedes bigger attack. “rPOTUS”: “real POTUS,” Trump. “Hold”: “stand back & stand by.” “Buckle up”: prepare for war. “1/50 k”: military scale maps. “Know your bridges”: militia speak for prepare to seize bridges. pic.twitter.com/8wMLQ0AvHA
What makes that even more chilling for me was that this all came down mere days after I saw Charlie Sadoff’s (incredibly) timely documentary. Sadoff’s study (which he co-wrote with Sebastian Junger and Kenneth Harbaugh) begins with an unsettling statistic: out of the approximately 1,000 people who have been officially charged for storming the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, 15% worked as police or military personnel. These are, of course, the folks who take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States.
The film not only delves into how military vets become radicalized but builds a timeline of modern right-wing extremism from the Ku Klux Klan’s public resurgence in the 1920s to current groups like the Proud Boys. The most revelatory “hidden history” aspect for me concerns the mid-70s to mid-80s-a period that saw a surge of Vietnam vets into various anti-government and racist groups, as well as the advent of “Liberty Net”, which holds the dubious distinction of being the first social network engineered by and for members of the neo-Nazi/white power movements.
Sadoff covers so much ground that this engrossing history begs a Ken Burns extended dance mix (occasional narration by Burns stalwart Peter Coyote adds to that flavor). That said, this is enough nightmare fuel for most viewers. You have been warned.
Downtown Owl (U.S.) *** – It took me a while to get into the rhythm of this quirky comedy-drama, which begins with a nod to Savage Steve Holland (palpable Better Off Dead energy) then pivots into a more angsty realm (as in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm). Adapted from Chuck Klosterman’s eponymous novel by writer-director Hamish Linklater (no relation to Richard), the story is set during the winter of 1983-1984 in a North Dakota burg (where everybody is up in everyone else’s business).
Julia (Lily Rabe) is a 40-ish, recently engaged, self-described “restless” soul who has just moved to Owl to take a teaching position at a high school. Episodic; we observe Julia over a period of several months as she acclimates to her new environs. She strikes up a friendship with a melancholy neighbor (Ed Harris) and pursues a crush on a laconic buffalo rancher (I told you it was quirky). There’s a sullen high school quarterback, and a pregnant teen (it’s a rule). All threads converge when a record-breaking blizzard descends on the sleepy hamlet. A bit uneven, but it grew on me.
TheFuture (Israel) **½ – A near-future tale about a surrogate mother-daughter relationship between an Israeli scientist (Reymond Amsalem), and a Palestinian college student (Samar Qupty) who has confessed to assassinating Israel’s Minister of Space and Tourism. The scientist heads “The Future Project”, which uses algorithms to predict terrorist attacks (shades of Philip K. Dick). The scientist has asked permission to conduct a psychological study of the young woman to determine why her crime eluded prediction. More “science-fiction” in tone than production design, writer-director Noam Kaplan’s economical film is essentially a chamber drama, bolstered by earnest lead performances but bogged down by its heavy-handed allegory.
Richland (U.S.) *** – [Shame mode] All the times I’ve zipped by the I-82 turn-off to Richland, Washington while driving on I-90 and thought “hey, isn’t that where that Hanford superfund nuclear thingy is?” I’ve never stopped to ponder its historical significance. Adjacent to the Hanford Nuclear Site that was built in the early 1940s to house nuclear government workers at the height of the Manhattan Project, Richland is, in essence, a company town; a true-to-life “atomic city” with a problematic legacy.
Then again, according to Irene Lusztig’s absorbing documentary, how “problematic” depends on who you talk to. For example, many current residents don’t see why anyone would make a fuss over the local high school football team’s “mascot”, which is a mushroom cloud. The town manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for decades following the end of WW2 (to which they had a direct hand in “ending”, via providing the plutonium for the ”Fat Man” nuclear bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki).
Lusztig incorporates archival footage for historical context; these segments reminded me of the 1982 documentary The Atomic Café. With Christopher Nolan’s anticipated biopic Oppenheimer looming (July 21st), this is a perfect primer for brushing up on America’s complex relationship with nuclear energy.
I was going to Fisk (an old blogging term) this WSJ editorial but I see that James Joyner did it already so I don’t have to. Seriously, it’s completely daft and a low point for the WSJ editorial page and that’s saying something. Never, ever let them forget this the next time they start hippie bashing over national security. The hypocrisy has never been so overwhelming.
Here’s Joyner:
That the WSJ editorial page tends toward reflexive fealty to Republican causes is no secret. But the Editorial Board should be ashamed of its latest effort.
A Destructive Trump Indictment
Do prosecutors understand the forces they are unleashing?
Already, this is ominous. They’re not only insinuating that violence is likely to occur but blaming the decision to indict a person for serious crimes, not the environment created by the individual under indictment.
Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, his indictment by President Biden’s Justice Department is a fraught moment for American democracy. For the first time in U.S. history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former President who is also running against the sitting President. This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come.
The Justice Department is not Joe Biden’s; it’s ours. We have not, in modern history, had a former President run for re-election after having been defeated. Only one recent President, Richard Nixon, has committed crimes so egregious that they would have been worthy of prosecution—and he would likely have been prosecuted if his successor hadn’t decided, probably rightly, that pardoning him was the best way for the country to move on.
Special counsel Jack Smith announced the indictment in a brief statement on Friday. But no one should be fooled: This is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s responsibility. Mr. Garland appointed Mr. Smith to provide political cover, but Mr. Garland, who reports to Mr. Biden, has the authority to overrule a special counsel’s recommendation.
It’s certainly the case that Garland could have ordered Smith not to file charges. Presumably, he didn’t because he agrees with Smith that the evidence is very strong that Trump committed sufficiently heinous and blatant crimes that prosecution was warranted.
Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.
Now, I’ve made a variation of this argument myself for quite some time. It’s absolutely the case that Trump supporters, and even some independents, will see this as a politically-motivated prosecution. There’s just no way around that, given who Trump is and the fact that the Attorney General is a political appointee.
The appointment of a special counsel is the only mechanism we have to create a veil of independence. As I noted at the time, Smith is almost the perfect choice in that regard but it’s not going to mollify Trumpers.
But it’s one thing to acknowledge the political reality of public perception and quite another to argue that the public is “right” to believe this is some authoritarian political repression by Biden and Garland. Faced with a former President who committed crimes, they have to either uphold the rule of law—their sworn duty—or not.
The indictment levels 37 charges against Mr. Trump that are related to his handling of classified documents, including at his Mar-a-Lago club, since he left the White House. Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the ancient and seldom-enforced Espionage Act for the “willful retention of national defense information.”
It’s true that the Espionage Act of 1917 is pretty old. It’s also true that it’s been amended multiple times over the years. That it’s “seldom-enforced” is simply untrue, unless we’re using sleight of hand to argue that prosecutions for espionage are relatively uncommon compared to those for more frequently-occurring crimes. Indeed, there were several prosecutions (Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, and Julian Assange being the most famous) during Trump’s presidency.
But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.
This doesn’t fit the spirit or letter of the PRA, which was written by Congress to recognize that such documents had previously been the property of former Presidents. If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense.
This is simply embarrassing nonsense. The whole point of the PRA was to establish public ownership of all Presidential records. Presidents are allowed to keep purely personal records as defined by law. But literally all official documents held by an incumbent President “automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist as soon as the President leaves office.”
The notion that former Presidents are allowed to simply take any classified documents—let alone the originals!—home with them is simply laughable.
The other counts are related to failing to turn over the documents or obstructing the attempts by the Justice Department and FBI to obtain them. One allegation is that during a meeting with a writer and three others, none of whom held security clearances, Mr. Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack’” from the Defense Department. “As president I could have declassified it,” he said on audio tape. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
The feds also say Mr. Trump tried to cover up his classified stash by “suggesting that his attorney hide or destroy documents,” as well as by telling an aide to move boxes to conceal them from his lawyer and the FBI.
As usual, Mr. Trump is his own worst enemy. “This would have gone nowhere,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS recently, “had the President just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”
Which would rather undercut the notion that this is some political sabotage by Biden and Garland, no?
That being said, if prosecutors think that this will absolve them of the political implications of their decision to charge Mr. Trump, they fail to understand what they’ve unleashed.
In the court of public opinion, the first question will be about two standards of justice. Mr. Biden had old classified files stored in his Delaware garage next to his sports car. When that news came out, he didn’t sound too apologetic. “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” Mr. Biden said. AG Garland appointed another special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate, but Justice isn’t going to indict Mr. Biden.
As for willful, how about the basement email server that Hillary Clinton used as Secretary of State? FBI director James Comey said in 2016 that she and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” According to him, 113 emails included information that was classified when it was sent or received. Eight were Top Secret. About 2,000 others were later “upclassified” to Confidential. This was the statement Mr. Comey ended by declaring Mrs. Clinton free and clear, since “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Should Biden have had classified documents from his days as Vice President in boxes in his private garage? No, he shouldn’t. Did he turn them over the moment they were discovered? Yes, he did.
Do I continue to think Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server in violation of established policy was egregious? Yes, I do. But Comey was absolutely right: while Clinton was sloppy and arrogant, her transgressions weren’t criminal—and certainly not to the level where we would prosecute a high government official.
Not only was Trump’s transgression orders of magnitudes worse he—again, by the Editorial Board’s own concession—would have faced zero chance of indictment had he simply turned the goddamn boxes of stolen secrets over when he was asked rather than stalling for months and forcing them to raid his compound.
I will step in here to point you to this piece that show Clinton’s server wasn’t sloppy or arrogant, she was following the same rules that other Secretaries of State had followed and — oh ferfucksake, You can read this is you’ve forgotten the details. It’s too exhausting to relitigate all over again. But I think we can all remember that he did not have nuclear fucking secrets on her server! Anyway…
This is the inescapable political context of this week’s indictment. The special counsel could have finished his investigation with a report detailing the extent of Mr. Trump’s recklessness and explained what secrets it could have exposed. Instead the Justice Department has taken a perilous path.
The charges are a destructive intervention into the 2024 election, and the potential trial will hang over the race. They also make it more likely that the election will be a referendum on Mr. Trump, rather than on Mr. Biden’s economy and agenda or a GOP alternative. This may be exactly what Democrats intend with their charges.
So, first, not indicting Trump would also have been a political act that impacted the 2020 race.
Second, is the argument that anyone who is a declared candidate for public office can never be charged with a crime?
Third, did the Editorial Board have this position vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton’s emails? Shockingly, no.
Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump. But the indictment might make GOP voters less inclined to provide a democratic verdict on his fitness for a second term. Although the political impact is uncertain, Republicans who are tired of Mr. Trump might rally to his side because they see the prosecution as another unfair Democratic plot to derail him.
That, of course, is a real possibility. But so what? Should DOJ make indictment decisions based on how it’ll impact the Republican primaries? Really?
And what about the precedent? If Republicans win next year’s election, and especially if Mr. Trump does, his supporters will demand that the Biden family be next. Even if Mr. Biden is re-elected, political memories are long.
If Joe Biden commits crimes, he should be prosecuted for them. And, frankly, Republicans were investigating Hunter Biden even before the discovery of the documents at Mar-a-Lago. The notion that a legitimate prosecution justifies illegitimate ones is baffling.
It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken.
Again, this is simply shameful. Trump committed multiple crimes. He’s been charged with 37 counts! This is not criminalizing politics.
It didn’t need to be. However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia. The FBI recovered the missing documents when it raided Mar-a-Lago, so presumably there are no more secret attack plans for Mr. Trump to show off.
So, first, we have no idea whether he accepted a bribe or betrayed secrets to Russia. Second, we have no idea whether all the documents were recovered. But, even if we assume that the only crimes he’s committed are those he’s charged with, so what? You’re allowed to commit 37 crimes so long as you don’t commit actual treason?
The greatest irony of the age of Trump is that for all his violating of democratic norms, his frenzied opponents have done and are doing their own considerable damage to democracy.
There’s been zero “frenzy” here. Garland is, if anything, hyper-cautious. And allowing former Presidents to wantonly violate the law isn’t exactly great for democracy, either.
These people are trying to drive us all crazy. Their shamelessness is a powerful psychological weapon designed to produce rage and a feeling of total impotence in the face of it.
They know they are wrong. They know Trump is full of shit and the people who love him are either evil or brain damaged or both. But their lives are organized around supporting their team regardless of what they do.
There is literally nothing Donald Trump or … say, an American Hitler, could do that would shake their commitment. They stuck with him through “grab ’em by the pussy” to “I don’t know why he would” to “I’d like you to do me a favor, though” to “we won in a landslide” and “we’re going to march to the Capitol” and never wavered.
Garth Brooks is selling Bud Light at his bar and says that the boycotters are assholes. The right is now calling for a boycott against Garth Brooks. Of course. (Read the comments to this…)
Look who’s making moral judgments about Garth Brooks:
I know, I know.
Garth does a great version of a Billy Joel song called “Shameless” and I think it’s called for right now:
