Bradley Moss is a high-powered attorney who specializes in national defense cases, and he now believes that Donald Trump will be indicted on counts stemming from his mishandling of highly classified material. His only question is whether this will occur before or after the upcoming midterm elections. Truthfully, I can’t think of anyone except a former president who could hope to avoid prosecution for what Trump has done.
Think about it. Trump illegally possessed information that, if revealed, is deemed to be a severe threat to the nation’s security, defense, foreign relations, and intelligence capabilities. He did not keep this information secure. He reluctantly turned some of it over to the National Archives, but had his lawyers make false representations that he had turned it all over. He appears to have taken steps to conceal this fact by secreting documents in various locations at his Mar-a-Lago resort. He was caught in his lies when a court-approved search of his premises confirmed the government’s suspicions.
This kind of behavior will land a person in the hoosegow every single time. But ex-presidents are admittedly not ordinary persons. At one time, Trump had a legal right to possess these documents. In fact, many of them were probably prepared specifically for him. And, he at least has an argument that he had the power to unilaterally declassify the documents, which could be a defense against some possible criminal charges, although probably not the charges listed on the search warrant which do not depend on the classification status of the contraband. But, more than anything, having the government of one party prosecuting the de facto leader of the other party sets a dangerous precedent that no one wants to establish.
Trump’s best defense is jury nullification. All he needs to get off is one juror, irrespective of the strength of the evidence, to refuse to convict. On the merits, the defenses he’s offered will not fly. His argument is that he declassified all the material he possessed. That’s not an automatic defense, even if true, because he still had no right to maintain possession of them, and he still appears to have obstructed the investigation and caused false representations to be made to the FBI.
But the nature of the documents also presents a big problem. This can be seen by the classification markings. In the 15 boxes he voluntarily turned over in January 2022, there were more than two dozen top secret documents, and more were turned over in June, and more still were discovered during the execution of the search warrant in August. Some of these were reported to contain information on the identity of people who have been recruited by the CIA to spy on their on their own governments. Other documents pertained to highly sensitive electronic surveillance collection and capabilities. Some were marked to indicate they could not be shared with any foreign government, whether friend or foe. Lastly, some were marked in a way that distinguished them as so secret that virtually no one is authorized to see them, and then only in a highly secure setting.
It should be obvious that the president of the United States should not, under virtually any circumstances, declassify this kind of information and make it subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. To suggest Trump did exactly this to all these documents is admitting to worse behavior than anything he was accused of in the government’s affidavit. Perhaps fortunately for Trump there is no evidence that he actually did declassify these documents, and as Moss points out, his lawyers have not tried to make that argument in court.
There is the contention by Trump and his allies that he declassified the documents, whether through a “standing order” or more specific verbal action. No evidence has been produced corroborating that assertion, and there certainly is no indication that the classification markings themselves were ever revised to reflect the declassification. The Trump lawyers in May certainly did not provide any such evidence in their letter to DOJ, and they similarly provided no evidence of it in their “motion” filed earlier this week in district court in Florida seeking a Special Master.
And that is before we even consider if the classification status would matter for an Espionage Act prosecution, which only requires that the information relate to the national defense.
The reason Trump is arguing that he declassified the documents is because it at leasts offers an explanation that can be walked out by his allies. But it’s a lie that actually makes him look more irresponsible. As a legal defense, it’s sparse and mostly inapplicable.
It certainly offers nothing to protect him against obstruction of justice charges. He could have told the truth about what he possessed and fought in court to keep it. But he allowed his lawyers to falsely state that everything had been turned over, and appears to have dispersed the documents in an effort to prevent their discovery.
I don’t know why he did these things or if they have any relationship to this:
Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world [in October 2021] about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.
The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.
One reason our informants might have started dying by the dozens at the end of the Trump and beginning of the Biden administrations is that foreign adversaries have become better at tracking the movement of our CIA officers (through biometric data, for example), or through other surveillance techniques. Or maybe there’s a mole in the intelligence community. But there’s also an ex-president whose been keeping files on these matters in an insecure manner, and he’s repeatedly lied about it.
And when I say the file(s) on CIA informants were stored insecurely, consider that the photo at the top of this article was taken at Mar-a-Lago in May 2021. The woman is Inna Yashchyshyn, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian who falsely claimed to be Anna de Rothschild, a Monaco-raised child of the famous banking family.
Anna de Rothschild blended in perfectly as she rolled through the gates at Mar-a-Lago. Bearing the name of European banking royalty, she flashed a Rolex on her wrist, drove a new Mercedes Benz AMG G63, and touted her connections to big real estate developments.
The rich and powerful she mingled with at the Florida resort, including close family and friends of the 45th president of the United States, seemed unaware that the confident 33-year-old with long, flowing locks was no Rothschild.
I don’t know why she infiltrated Mar-a-Lago, but I know there was a poorly secured room in the basement that had some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. If Trump does go to trial for this, it will be interesting to see if the jury hears about “Anna de Rothschild.”
Lock him up!
So it’s starting to feel like what is happening is that Trump might get indicted on these charges related to document handling, and once that domino falls perhaps there will be “real” criminal charges against him pertaining to his coup, and maybe all of the other crimes he committed in broad daylight and bragged about on Twitter?
Obscene wealth, celebrity, and power are a cancer eating this country up. There’s almost nothing left to salvage.
If Trump does get indicted, the GOP should be indicted too (at the ballot box) because they allowed this fraud to infiltrate their party and nearly destroyed the country. Patriots? Law and Order? Family Values? Oh please! They abandoned those principles long ago. If voters really care about our country they should not let the GOP and their allies destroy it.
Here’s the thing about large bureaucracies (very much including the FBI, DOJ, and the federal courts): they are slow to move into action but once they do, they’re even harder to stop. The inertial force of memos, and records, and court filings, and affidavits has a power of its own. Here’s how Jimmy Breslin wrote about it in his Watergate book when Nixon was scrambling to avoid accountability:
This is why I have at least a shred of hope. As long as this was only being conducted in the court of public opinion, and its level of importance reflected only by how long it was able to entertain and profit the mainstream media, who quickly become bored with anything that requires a significant, long term investment in both time and effort, then it could have easily disappeared from our national radar screen as soon as a new shiny object came along that triggered their catnip reaction for covering shallow and tightly scripted stories. The kinds of stories that can be covered in a few nights of 2:30 snippets, a few rounds on the Sunday shows, and maybe a 1 hour special to neatly wrap it up and put a pretty bow on it once they felt it was time to move on to the next glittering distraction.
But this has moved to a phase that now cannot simply be overwhelmed with firehoses of bullshit, a ton of whataboutism, and the comfort for criminals that those covering it will grow bored with the tedium. The legal system is built on slow and steady tedium, the kind described so well by Jimmy Breslin. So let “the papers grow, their edges become sharper, sharper, sharper”, as we all stand by waiting for those first few drops of blood as the papers begin to cut through what seemed like the perpetually unaccountable and untouchable criminal named Donald Trump.