Trump’s stealing, mishandling, and concealing of United States defense secrets is on the Republican Party for refusing to remove Donald Trump from office when it was clear he was not fit to be president. They had the chance to remove him (twice) but instead shielded him.
This is on them.
New Information about the Search Warrant
This week the DOJ released a heavily redacted copy of the affidavit accompanying the warrant to search Mar-a-Lago. I updated this timeline of the stolen-documents case with the new info. If you want to get caught up, click here to check it out. In a nutshell, Trump stole top-secret defense documents and refused to give them back, so the court approved a search warrant so the government could retrieve them.
The fact that Trump thought he could make off with US military secrets when he lost reelection is weird and creepy.
Trump’s relationship to executive privilege offers a good sense of what we’re dealing with.
(Executive privilege is the power of the President and other officials in the executive branch to withhold certain forms of confidential communication from the courts and the legislative branch. The idea is that the president should be able to communicate freely with advisors. The privilege is never absolute. There are always occasions when the need for the information outweighs the president’s privacy interests. Moreover, privileges can’t be used to conceal crimes.)
Trump and Executive Privilege
On Aug. 24, 2021, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol issued a request for documents, including presidential documents housed at the National Archives. (The PRA, The Presidential Records Act, requires all records generated by the President to be housed at the NARA.) The Act also gives the sitting president final authority over whether to assert executive privilege over presidential documents.
President Biden declined to assert executive privilege and authorized the Archives to release the records to Congress.
On October 18, 2021, Trump sued to stop the records from being sent to Congress on the ground that he was asserting executive privilege and that his wishes should outweigh Biden’s because they involved his tenure in the White House.
Trump lost. The court held that if the incumbent president and the former president differ over whether to claim privilege over particular documents, the incumbent president gets the final say because the privilege protects the office of the presidency, not a particular president. Trump appealed. He lost again. He appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear his case, meaning it was over.
So the National Archives sent the presidential records to the House select committee.
But . . . (da dum, da dum) . . . it turns out that Trump was hiding records at Mar-a-Lago, so in fact, the select committee didn’t get all the records.
This spring, when the National Archives and FBI were trying to get the documents back, Trump again claimed executive privilege. His new lawyer, Corcoran, when telling the NARA and FBI why they couldn’t have the documents, made the same arguments that Trump had made in his losing lawsuit. A National Archives official, in a letter dated May 10, patiently explained to Trump why he doesn’t have the right to assert executive privilege.
Trump still refused to turn over the records, so the FBI obtained a search warrant and retrieved the documents.
Even after all of that, this week Trump filed a motion asking the court to appoint a special master to review the seized material partly on the grounds that they’re covered by executive privilege.
Me = facepalm. There’s no getting through to this guy, right?
The irony is that even if the documents seized were covered by executive privilege (they’re not because Biden gave permission for them to be released), this would mean, by law, they would need to be housed in the National Archives. Thus his claim this week of executive privilege was an admission that he is in possession of stolen documents because, by law, privileged records belong in the National Archives.
So Trump stole materials and then tried to claim a privilege he doesn’t have—even after courts and others have repeatedly told him he doesn’t have the privilege.
Just for fun, let’s take a look at what Trump filed in court this week
Once in a while, we need comic relief. The filing is here.
It’s easy to read. In fact, it looks like he wrote it himself. For example, I’ll bet Trump wrote this part:
“President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run.”
He added that his endorsement in the 2022 midterm elections was “decisive” for Republican candidates. (I think he meant the primaries). And apparently, the FBI should have taken into account that searching his premise would “distress most Americans.” Most? I don’t know about that.
He explains that when his family moved from the White House to Florida, “like most Americans, the move involved boxes. It was done during the day, with the boxes in full view.” The paragraph mentions “movers” three times. (As one of my followers on Twitter asked, ‘Is he trying to throw Allied Van Lines under the bus?”) I thought this was odd. Then I noticed that on a heavily redacted search warrant affidavit left unredacted mention of moving trucks:
Then the obvious occurred to me. It’s possible that Trump is accused of having sensitive top secret defense secrets packed and moved by a commercial mover. (These are documents highly regulated as to where and how they can be stored and who can have access.)
We do get the story from his viewpoint. He admits that earlier in the year, some of the documents he returned included some he believed were covered by “executive privilege,” which means he shouldn’t have taken them. On May 11, he “accepted service” of a grand jury subpoena. He “determined” that his staff should “search for documents bearing classified markings, even if they had been declassified.” On June 2: He “invited” the FBI to retrieve “responsive” documents. On June 3: Jay Bratt and 3 FBI agents came. Trump greeted them in the dining room. Before leaving “President Trump’s last words to Bratt and the FBI agents were as follows: “Whatever you need, just let us know.”
So helpful! (He likes calling himself “President Trump.”)
Of course, he didn’t return all the top secret documents, which was why the FBI finally came in with a search warrant to get them all.
What he says about Garland’s press announcement is so deluded that I can’t even. Because Garland doesn’t mention the message Trump passed along to him about how his supporters were so angry about the search that they had to find a way to bring the temperature down, he concludes from Garland’s speech is that the decision to search Mar-a-Lago was to diminish the “leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump.”
He also makes an “everyone was mean to me” argument. No kidding. This was a heading in his brief:
THE GOVERNMENT HAS LONG TREATED PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP UNFAIRLY
What he’s doing, actually, is trying to set up a political persecution defense. The problem is that the appropriate time to do that is at trial, not in the pre-indictment stage.
He also mixes in a Fourth Amendment argument, claiming that the search violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Here’s the problem with that: If a defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights are violated, the remedy is to file a pre-trial motion to suppress the evidence. This happens after the indictment.
Trump’s attitude toward executive privilege is similar to his attitude toward the election fraud claims
No matter how many times Trump lost in court over his election fraud claims, and no matter how many times he was told by people like his own Attorney General Barr and White House counsel that there was no fraud and he lost the election, he insisted that he won the election and there was widespread fraud.
For more on why, see this post