The Crimes Clearly Defined

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
-- Albert Camus

Following up on the local aspects of the January 6th Insurrection here among the Tampa Bay denizens. A jury convicted a man involved with the riot on charges related to his involvement on Capitol Hill (via Dan Sullivan at the Tampa Bay Times (paywall)): 

Jeremy Brown, a former U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant linked to the Jan. 6 insurrection, was found guilty Monday on six of 10 federal criminal charges related to weapons and classified information that authorities found in his Tampa home.

After a weeklong trial, a jury of six men and six women deliberated about five hours Monday afternoon before deciding that Brown was guilty of illegally possessing two guns, a pair of hand grenades and a single classified document related to the search for a formerly missing soldier in Afghanistan.

But the panel also found Brown not guilty of possessing four other documents related to national defense, which federal agents found on a CD inside his girlfriend’s recreational vehicle...

I do wonder if the federal prosecutors will now go after the girlfriend for those classified docs in her RV, or did she turn state's evidence already...? Anywho:

Federal agents found the illegal items last year during a search of Brown’s property amid a probe into his connection to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.

He’s accused in a separate case in Washington, D.C., of being among the rioters who disrupted certification of the 2020 election results, though Brown is not accused of actually entering the Capitol building.

Brown didn’t deny that the sawed-off shotgun and the short-barreled rifle that agents found at his home were his. The guns were not registered in a federal database, as required by law.

But his attorney, Roger Futerman, argued to the jury that most of the other items — including the grenades and a CD with a red label marked “secret” which contained documents detailing military activities in Afghanistan — were planted by federal agents.

The defense lawyer pointed to forensic evidence that showed DNA on the hand grenades came from someone other than Brown. He also highlighted a number of peculiarities in the way agents conducted and documented the search. Most notably: they turned off Brown’s home security cameras upon entering.

“The evidence was manipulated and planted,” Futerman said. “I can’t tell you when it was planted or who planted it. But the forensics don’t lie.”

Futerman also asserted that for Brown to be guilty of possessing classified material related to national defense, there would have to be proof that he had a “bad purpose” for the material...

Having followed the classified documents scandal involving trump at Mar-A-Lago (and now arguably other unsecured places), I've seen that argument Futerman makes, and that it's already been debunked. The government doesn't have to prove "bad purpose" regarding classified documents, all they have to prove is that you SHOULD NOT HAVE THOSE DOCS IN THE FIRST PLACE, and it's looking like the jury understood that.

Arguing that the feds planted evidence is always a legal defense, but without actual proof of the frame-up what the hell else could Futerman claim? Brown confessed to having illegal firearms anyway, why would the feds throw in (metaphorically) a bunch of illegal grenades and (not-so-metaphorically) classified documents? If they were trying to frame Brown with relation to his January 6th actions, why didn't the feds set up more "fake evidence" tying him to that in order to create a "stronger case" on the insurrection charges Brown will face later in DC?

The jury had to consider the conspiracy angles that Futerman was selling them, and refused to buy what he was offering. The simplest explanation after all - that Brown was caught red-handed by the people investigating him for crimes elsewhere - is usually the correct one.

Brown is, by the by, one of hundreds - as of this week, there are 465 rioters who've already plead guilty, out of 960 charged (so far), and by my count about 12 convicted by juries - tied into trump's insurrection effort that have faced the music (also known as "fucked around, found out"). There were roughly 2000 people present at the break-in to the Capitol building, although not all of them have faced legal consequences so far. The Justice Department seems to be focusing on the more violent ones, the rioters who actively attempted to interfere with the Electoral College count and the confirmation of Joe Biden's Presidential win.

trump's insurrectionists can whine and claim they're being framed all they want. But we all witnessed what happened that January 6th. Their crimes are clearly defined. It's now a question of them paying for what they've broken.

A Terrible Job of Hiding

I was going to write about the final results of the 2022 Midterms, with the Georgia runoff victory for Warnock giving the Democrats 51-seat control of the Senate, but then this afternoon the social media was jumping up and down about new developments in the Top Secret Classified Documents scandal at donald trump's Mar-A-Lago.

Well actually, the documents NOT at donald trump's Mar-A-Lago.

It turns out that Former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) trump was just leaving classified folders of vital information all over Palm Beach County. Via Hugo Lowell at The Guardian: 

Donald Trump’s lawyers found at least two more documents bearing classification markings inside boxes at a storage unit in Florida when they searched through items that were brought from the White House at the end of his administration, one source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

The new discovery could exacerbate the former president’s legal exposure after the FBI seized 103 documents marked classified at his Mar-a-Lago resort in August as part of the justice department’s criminal investigation into the possible unauthorized retention of national security information and obstruction of justice.

The presence of documents marked classified in a second location beyond Mar-a-Lago, earlier reported by the Washington Post, appears to confirm the justice department’s suspicions, communicated to Trump’s lawyers in October, that Trump possessed additional government records...

Trump’s lawyers were ordered in recent weeks to conduct a more thorough search of items in the former president’s possession by Beryl Howell, the chief US district court judge for the District of Columbia, in a sealed order issued as part of a closed-door court battle.

The order capped a weeks-long process that started after the justice department expressed concern that Trump still had additional documents marked classified in his possession, potentially at other properties, after the FBI seized thousands of materials at Mar-a-Lago on 8 August...

This wasn't anything associated to Judge Cannon's Special Master situation in South Florida - which is still unresolved after the 11th Circuit's ruling - but associated with the ongoing investigations being conducted back in Washington DC, where jurisdiction over federal classified materials are handled. This points to the likelihood that the Special Counsel's office that took over multiple investigations into trump's misdeeds is closing in on criminal charges sooner rather than later. The FBI and Justice Department are NOT slowing up on finding out where every still-missing document can be found. And they seem to have a pretty good idea already what trump's taken: They're still digging because they know there's more classified documents out there.

While it was trump's own lawyers - hiring an outside team to do the digging - that uncovered the fact that even more classified materials are out there in the wild, this revelation proves that it's not just Mar-A-Lago that was trump's only hiding spot for Top Secret stuff he shouldn't have had. If the documents are in more than one location, then every location trump and his people have access to are ripe locations for hiding these docs.

Making it worse is how trump is stashing these classified documents in places that could easily be gotten to. I know, a storage facility in this day and age will have security cameras, double locks, gates and doors, all that. If a foreign power or corrupt corporation found out trump had documents in a storage unit, it would be all too easy to rent a storage unit nearby, walk in normally like you're accessing your own bin, break the lock to trump's storage, sift through what you can find at leisure, and calmly walk back out before anyone notices the busted lock.

It would be easier than getting into Mar-A-Lago, which is notoriously easy to get into in the first place.

This is both hilarious - that trump is just stupid enough to do this - and horrifying - that trump is just stupid enough to do this - enough that we can't ignore this report.

Frankly, I did a better job of hiding my porn stash from my parents when I was 18 way better than trump did hiding our national security secrets.

(Pause)

Shut up. October 1988 was a good month. (Waves hi to Shannon)

Like the elaborations of a bad liar, donald trump is doing a terrible job of hiding the evidence he should never have taken.

Time to issue search warrants for EVERY property trump owns and visited since January 2021. There's bound to be more documents out there to recover that trump's taken with him.

Special Counsel Jack Smith better move fast. Those spies are rushing to the U-Haul Storage buildings nearest to every other trump property as I type this.

The First Option Means trump is Running Out of Time

When last we left donald trump's legal woes revolving around his theft of Presidential papers and lax handling of classified documents, the 11th Circuit appellate was reviewing whether Judge Cannon's efforts to shield trump with a Special Master delaying tactic was even legal.

Well, the 11th Circuit came down hard on their decision against trump. Let Emptywheel guide us to our table so we can feast on the Schadenfreude:

The 11th Circuit has, as expected, vacated Aileen Cannon’s order enjoining the government from investigating Donald Trump, remanding it with an order to dismiss the suit...

The opinion’s key point is that, were they to rule for Trump, it would create an impossible precedent, either halting much pre-indictment access to seized material, or creating an exception only for former Presidents.

(quoting from the court ruling) In considering these arguments, we are faced with a choice: apply our usual test; drastically expand the availability of equitable jurisdiction for every subject of a search warrant; or carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents. We choose the first option. So the case must be dismissed.

[snip]

The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be  a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations. Accordingly, we agree with the government that the district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction, and that dismissal of the entire proceeding is required.

Much of the opinion is an Richey analysis–the analysis Cannon worked so hard to manufacture. It’s not all that interesting. The key point is that, as Jay Bratt told Judge Cannon on August 30, the precedent in the circuit is clear.

But in conducting a Richey analysis, which it ultimately called a “sideshow,” the opinion took repeated swipes at the efforts Cannon went to make shit up to benefit Trump...

The only thing specific to Trump’s status as an ex-President, besides the opinion’s repeated reminder that he is not special, is the way with which the opinion twice dismissed Trump’s claim that if he had designated these documents his personal property under the Presidential Records Act, it would allow him to keep it. That’s nonsense, of course, because warrants authorize the seizure of personal property as a general rule...

A very conservative panel, including two Trump appointees, just confirmed that he’s not special anymore.

Emptywheel does note the court gives trump seven days to file an appeal, which trump's lawyers will likely do because it will both delay the FBI a little further as well as give trump the hope that taking it to the Supreme Court where three of his own appointees and two more Far Right Justices can arguably rewrite the entire legal system to protect trump's ass.

It's a part of trump's defense that he's claiming "personal property" regarding everything seized by the FBI at Mar-A-Lago back in August. Problem is, we're talking about a lot of classified materials that nobody else besides trump can argue were declassified to allow trump to claim them as personal. And there's still a high likelihood trump took the type of classified documents - especially regarding nuclear secrets! - that he couldn't have declassified by himself at all.

For any of this legal fight to fall trump's way, the Supreme Court itself when it gets his appeal is going to have to either declare the Presidential Records Act fully Unconstitutional (as well as accept that Cannon was within her powers to set up a Special Master that nearly every legal expert - and now the 11th Circuit judges - claims she never had power to do), or that trump as ex-President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) retains Executive Privileges in ways that would break the checks and balances of the Constitution itself.

Right now, it's looking like the Justice Department will be able to continue their investigation into what documents trump actually took, and assess which documents are still unrecovered, and figure out just how badly trump violated our nation's security.

I hope trump doesn't sleep well for the rest of the month. I hope he starts plotting which nation he can fly to avoid extradition first chance he gets.

I hope the Special Counsel that AG Garland set up last month is ready to arrest trump for every federal law he broke.

It's December, kids. Time to be festive. IO SATURNALIA.

The Hounds Snap Fierce at trump's Heels

(The article title refers to a quote from Euripides' Electra, but I can't find the actual source. It may be from an disreputable early translation)

A lot of stuff related to donald trump's criminal shenanigans happened today.

The silliest thing to report is how New York Attorney General Letitia James went to court to ask the judge to stop trump and his people from forming a new corporation in Delaware in a likely attempt to avoid the $250 million civil suit James had filed earlier this year. Why is it silly?

Because the best name trump could come up with it was "Trump Organization II LLC".

Yes, social media exploded with "Electric Boogaloo" jokes.

If you're going to try and hide your wealth from a state-level civil suit, try to rebuild your business empire with a new holding elsewhere, don't you think you should come up with a completely new name so that NOBODY CAN SEE YOU STARTING A NEW COMPANY TO AVOID ACCOUNTABILITY??? You know, name it something more generic or obscure like "DT Corporate Holdings LLC" or "Acme Developments INC" or some such.

trump's vanity is so overwhelming he couldn't dare allow a new corporate entity exist without his name emblazoned - in gold font, no less - all over the paperwork. So OF COURSE AG James and her staff spotted it and called it a clear attempt to dodge the hammer her office is dropping on him.

In more important legal news today, the Supreme Court dismissed trump's plea to intervene in the Special Master situation between Judge Cannon, the 11th Circuit, and the FBI, meaning that the Special Master will not have access - and thus, neither will trump and his lawyers who were hoping to force the Special Master to grant them oversight - to the 100-plus classified documents found at Mar-A-Lago. More details via Mark Sherman and Jessica Gresko at AP News:

The Trump team was asking the justices to overturn a lower court ruling and permit an independent arbiter, or special master, to review the roughly 100 documents with classified markings that were taken in the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.

The move Thursday appears to greatly reduce the potential impact of the special master process to the ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation into the classifed documents.

A federal appeals court had already restored the department’s access to the classified documents, which had been investigators’ primary goal. And the Supreme Court’s decision to stay out of the fray ensures that the special master will not have access to those same records as the FBI and Justice Department evaluate if criminal charges are merited...

The Justice Department's full appeal against Judge Cannon's intervention for her benefactor trump is still ongoing.

And in a more dramatic development today, the House Select Committee investigation the January 6th Insurrection mostly wrapped up their proceedings this afternoon, revealing more evidence how trump and his handlers planned for violence that day to disrupt the electoral confirmation that Biden won. The committee did leave a possibility of at least one more presentation by voting unanimously to subpoena donald trump to testify to them about his role in what they've uncovered. Over at The Atlantic, David A. Graham thinks this should happen, because the people need to know:

The House Select Committee on January 6 ended what may be its final public hearing today with what is almost certainly a futile gesture: The members voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump for testimony and documents about his effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election and his incitement of a mob that attacked the Capitol.

The odds that they will get their way are effectively zero. Trump will surely fight the subpoena, just as many of his associates have resisted the committee’s demands. One of them, Steve Bannon, was even convicted for contempt of Congress. Whether or not the committee could compel Trump’s testimony in the abstract—and the legal and constitutional questions are complicated—doing so requires time that the committee likely doesn’t have. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm elections, the liquidation (or appropriation) of the committee will be one of their first orders of business.

But what is likely to happen, and what is legally enforceable, are not the same as what is right. The American people deserve to hear from Trump.

Much of today’s hearing was a summary of what the panel has laid out in previous sessions, arranged to make the case that Trump had a premeditated plan to contest the election and declare victory, no matter the results; that he knew he had lost and claimed victory anyway; that he lied in claiming election fraud; that he had a role in putting together the violent mob that assembled in Washington on January 6; and that he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol in full awareness that they were armed and would do harm...

The committee has unearthed an impressive amount of evidence about the paperwork coup before January 6 and about the planning and execution of the insurrection itself—far more than many observers, including me, expected. But some facts remain out of reach. Vice Chair Liz Cheney said that more than 30 people invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the committee. Others, such as former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, offered insightful testimony on many topics but refused to disclose conversations with Trump because of executive-privilege claims.

All of this is why the nation must hear from Trump himself. He is the one person best equipped to know what he planned before the election, what he was doing on January 6, and what he was thinking and feeling at the time. Although it is true that Trump is not always self-aware, and plain that he is exceptionally dishonest in his public statements, his language in sworn testimony is surprisingly honest and blunt, as I reported in 2018...

If Trump does fight the subpoena, or if he were to invoke his own Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, the implication would be clear for the public to see. The Fifth Amendment right is just that: a baseline constitutional right. A criminal defendant’s decision to invoke it is not admissible as evidence of guilt. But this is not a criminal proceeding. It is a political one, in every sense, and it is a matter of great importance for the safety of American democracy. The public deserves a chance to know what its president was doing in a pivotal moment and to make up its own mind about a political leader outside the artificial environment of a courtroom.

If Trump is too cowardly to tell the public, under oath, what really happened on January 6, that will be the clearest testimony the committee gathers to prove its theory...

It is obvious trump will fight the subpoena, and pray for the House to flip Republican this November - this is WHY the 81 million who showed up to vote him out in 2020 need to show up again this midterms to stop the Republicans from any win, hint fucking hint - so he can avoid accountability.

But the House Committee did something else this hearing: They made it clear they can refer their findings of possible criminal activities by trump and his insurrection plotters to the Department of Justice, which is currently outside of Republican reach. The DOJ is likely to file those charges to go alongside everything they're ready to do regarding trump's theft of White House documents when he left office in 2021. There's hints from the DOJ appeals that they are prepping to file charges over violations of the Presidential Records Act in the DC courts - nowhere near Mar-A-Lago and far away from Judge Cannon's reach - that have jurisdiction. 

The process needs to speed up, though. Gods help us, time is running short on exposing the crimes trump committed.

Just charge trump already and let justice be done...

Quick Update on trump's Legal Woes As We Head Into October 2022

The past week has been a little busy for donald trump's lawyers, so let's recap.

You might remember that trump had found a district judge he appointed to throw up roadblocks to the FBI's digging into all the classified materials they caught him with, when Judge Cannon agreed to his demands for a Special Master to delay everything. Well, the Justice Department appealed that, going to the 11th Circuit to allow the feds to continue their work. The judges at the 11th - including two who were appointed by trump - threw a smackdown on Cannon and trump in response (via Emptywheel):

While reserving judgment on the merits question, the opinion was nevertheless fairly scathing about Cannon’s abuse of discretion. Some of this pertained to her jurisdictional analysis... But two important implicit admonishments of Cannon’s actions pertain to the deference on national security that courts give to the Executive.

The opinion calls the scheme that Cannon had set up — allowing the Intelligence Community to continue its intelligence assessment but prohibiting any investigation for criminal purposes — untenable. In support, the opinion notes that there’s a sworn declaration from FBI Assistant Director Alan Kohler (the only one in this docket) debunking Cannon’s distinction between national security review and criminal investigation. It notes, twice, that courts must accord great weight to the Executive, including an affidavit. The opinion notes that “no party had offered anything beyond speculation” to undermine this representation...

In another section, the opinion makes a finding that goes beyond where the dispute before Cannon has gone (but not beyond where the dispute before Special Master Raymond Dearie has). Even former Presidents can only access classified information if they have a Need to Know. (Italics for the appellate decision)

[W]e cannot discern why Plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings. Classified documents are marked to show they are classified, for instance, with their classification level. Classified National Security Information, Exec. Order No. 13,526, § 1.6, 3 C.F.R. 298, 301 (2009 Comp.), reprinted in 50 U.S.C. § 3161 app. at 290–301. They are “owned by, produced by or for, or . . . under the control of the United States Government.” Id. § 1.1. And they include information the “unauthorized disclosure [of which] could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security.” Id. § 1.4. For this reason, a person may have access to classified information only if, among other requirements, he “has a need-to-know the information.” Id. § 4.1(a)(3). This requirement pertains equally to former Presidents, unless the current administration, in its discretion, chooses to waive that requirement. Id. § 4.4(3).

Plaintiff has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents. Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents. And even if he had, that, in and of itself, would not explain why Plaintiff has an individual interest in the classified documents...

In short: trump had no privilege to claim.

And then there was the 11th Circuit ruling about Cannon's authority to intervene in the first place. Back to Emptywheel:

The summary of this case is a really remarkable description of what has already happened (I’m sure it helped the clerks on that front that they had no page limits). Ominously for Trump’s case, the opinion starts the narrative from the time he left the White House and lays out several moments where Trump failed to invoke privilege or declassification. Trump likes to tell the story starting on August 8 when the FBI arrived at his house out of the blue...

This means trump can't stick to his story that he always had the right to possess these documents when he really didn't. I digress, back to good part:

In Trump’s reply to DOJ’s argument that he couldn’t own these documents, the opinion notes, he specifically disclaimed having filed a Rule 41(g), which is where someone moves to demand property unlawfully seized be returned...

Cannon, the opinion notes, claimed to be asserting jurisdiction under equitable jurisdiction even while treating Trump’s request (in which he had not made a Rule 41(g) motion) as a hybrid request...

Half that page of the opinion consists of footnotes, recording that Trump’s claims about Rule 41(g) have been all over the map...

trump and his lawyers are wary of filing actual paperwork - that Rule 41(g) - on ownership because if they do, and the courts rule he had no right to classified materials in his possession, he'll basically be confessing to breaking that particular federal law. Instead, they claim everything and anything just on say-so in the hopes a favorable court will buy that defense. Oh, right. I'm interrupting. Back to Emptywheel.

The opinion doesn’t come to any conclusions about all this nonsense from a jurisdictional position. It doesn’t have to. But it did capture conflicting claims that Trump made and Cannon’s reliance on a “hybrid” claim to avoid pinning Trump down.

The reason the 11th Circuit didn’t have to resolve all this is because, regardless of which basis Cannon claimed to have intervened, Richey governs (which is exactly what Jay Bratt said in the hearing before Cannon, as I laid out here).

And the first prong of Richey — and the most important one — is whether there has been a Fourth Amendment violation. Cannon says there has not. That should be game over...

While this is an appellate ruling, trump can arguably push the matter further up the chain - is SCOTUS next? - but one interesting development from this ruling was how Cannon went back and revised parts of her court ruling to fit the demands of the 11th Circuit... which apparently makes it harder for trump to appeal those parts. Interesting.

Meanwhile, the Thing Cannon Set Up - the Special Master situation involving a court-approved arbitrator over the documents in question - settled on Judge Raymond Dearie to serve in that capacity, and he promptly kicked trump's lawyers in the collective tuckus in ways that showed trump wasn't getting an easy out (the AP News but quoted via the Guardian):

The independent arbiter tasked with inspecting documents seized in an FBI search of Donald Trump’s Florida home said on Tuesday he intends to push briskly through the review process and appeared skeptical of Trump lawyers’ reluctance to say whether they believed the records had been declassified.

“We’re going to proceed with what I call responsible dispatch,” Raymond Dearie, a veteran Brooklyn judge, told lawyers for Trump and the Department of Justice in their first meeting since his appointment last week as a so-called special master...

Though Trump’s lawyers requested the appointment of a special master, they have resisted Dearie’s request for more information about whether the seized records had been previously declassified – as Trump maintains. His lawyers have consistently stopped short of that claim even as they asserted in a separate filing on Tuesday that the department of justice had not proven that the documents were classified. In any event, they say, a president has absolute authority to declassify information...

But Dearie said that if Trump’s lawyers will not actually assert that the records have been declassified, and the department of justice makes an acceptable case that they remain classified, he will be inclined to regard them as classified.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “that’s the end of it.”

In a letter to Dearie on Monday night, the lawyers said the declassification issue might be part of Trump’s defense in the event of an indictment. Trusty said the Trump team should not be forced at this point to disclose details of a possible defense.

He denied that the lawyers were trying to engage in “gamesman-like” behavior but said it was a process that required “baby steps”. He said the right time for the discussion is whenever Trump presses forward with a claim to get property back.

Dearie said he understood the position but observed: “I guess my view of it is, you can’t have your cake and eat it...”

A US district judge, Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who granted the request for a special master, had set a 30 November deadline for Dearie’s review and instructed him to prioritize classified records.

Dearie, a Ronald Reagan appointee, made clear during Tuesday’s meeting that he intended to meet the deadline...

Other reports have it that Dearie is looking to wrap up by October, likely because he already sees the reality that there's not much to separate between the classified documents and anything trump claims as privileged. Granted, that's my speculation. No matter what, trump's traditional gaming of the legal system - delay, delay, delay - isn't going to work here.

The other big bombshell from last week was the breaking development in the state of New York's civil case against trump, trump's family, and their corporation. As mentioned earlier when I looked at the big four legal matters dogging trump, AG Letitia James had wrapped up her interviews for the grand jury, and apparently had enough to take it all to court seeking major damages and a long-overdue crippling of trump's crooked financial empire (via John Cassidy at the New Yorker (paywalled)): 

The lawsuit that her office filed in State Supreme Court alleges that, from 2011 to 2021, the Trump Organization’s financial statements systematically exaggerated the value of at least twenty-three of his properties and other assets—from his Fifth Avenue triplex apartment and his daughter’s penthouse on Park Avenue to his estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, and his far-flung network of golf courses. “The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year,” the lawsuit states. It also says that Trump’s alleged deceptions reaped him and his co-defendants financial benefits worth up to an estimated $250 million, and asked the court to force him to repay these gains, plus interest.

In addition to Trump, the lawsuit names his children Donald, Jr., Eric, and Ivanka as defendants. In 2014, the complaint says, Ivanka was granted an option to buy a penthouse at Trump Park Avenue for $14.3 million, but the apartment was valued in the Trump Organization’s 2014 “Statement of Financial Condition” at $45 million. According to the lawsuit, Trump’s son Eric was “taking the lead” on Seven Springs estate, a large property in Westchester County, New York—which Trump bought for $7.5 million, in 1995, but between 2011 and 2021 valued at up to $291 million. The complaint also alleges that, in 2016, the Trump Organization misled an outside appraiser that prepared a valuation of the Seven Springs property, which it then submitted to the Internal Revenue Service in support of an application for a conservation easement “that ultimately, and fraudulently, reduced Mr. Trump’s tax liability by more than $3.5 million...”

In short: trump lied about how valuable his properties were when it came time to profit from them, and then lied that the properties were valueless when it came time to pay taxes on them.

Where Trump and his businesses crossed the legal line, the complaint alleges, was in producing false financial statements that grossly inflated his net worth to “induce banks to lend money to the Trump Organization on more favorable terms than would otherwise have been available to the company, to satisfy continuing loan covenants, and to induce insurers to provide insurance coverage for higher limits and at lower premiums.” The complaint identifies numerous loans and insurance policies that it said were granted at least partly on the basis of claims Trump made about his wealth in a “Statement of Financial Condition”—a list of his assets and liabilities that the Trump Organization produced annually...

This is where there's more good news:

James said her office is also referring her case to federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the I.R.S. In the absence of actions by those agencies, the potential sanctions facing the Trumps, if James wins her case, are a big financial penalty, the appointment of an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization for at least five years, a prohibition on Trump or the Trump Organization buying any new commercial real estate in New York during the same period, and a ban on any of the Trumps named in the lawsuit serving as an officer or director in any businesses licensed or registered in the state.

Effectively, James is trying to banish Trump and his family from doing business in their longtime home state...

James apparently uncovered criminal acts in all of the fraud trump and his people committed during their shell games with property values. It would be pretty to think that despite the City of New York's failure to bring more criminal charges against trump, the IRS will go after him for tax evasion like they've done to every mob boss since Al Capone. 

It could be argued that even after all this, trump and co. could simply relocate their business efforts to a more favorable state and restart, except that James is looking to keep trump from doing any business with any entity in New York. That covers New York City, and THAT - the financial capital of the world - covers nearly every bank on the planet. Meaning if James wins her case, there will be no way for trump and his adult progeny to do business they way they've done - through sketchy loans to pay off other sketchy loans - for at least five years.

It would kill trump not to run any kind of con job at all. trump has no actual value outside of his scams, he's a clown living on credit. A victory by AG James would be a fate worse than death for trump.

Bring it. Bankrupt the bastard. Send him into financial exile for the rest of his short life. And be rid of trump forever.

With My Mind, It Makes It Unreal

Okay, with all the craziness in the past twenty-four hours, there's a little too much about trump's legal woes to cram into one blog article at the moment, but I will focus on this (via Crooks & Liars):

No, seriously, what the hell?

I understand a little that trump is desperate to gaslight his way out of a legal jam here, by claiming every classified document the FBI recovered at Mar-A-Lago was secretly declassified - so he can avoid the serious espionage charges he's facing - but he can't fit those lies into the reality that NOBODY who worked for him can confirm he gave any "standing order" to declassify the documents he kept. So he's taking the "when the President does it, it means it's legal" argument and pushing it into the meta-level by claiming "when the President THINKS IT, it means it's legal."

That argument still runs into the problem that NOBODY ELSE CAN READ HIS SHIT-FILLED MIND, and can confirm what documents were declassified or not.

Jesus. This is like claiming "Well, in my mind I ate a slice of pie, so that pie must have been real." Or worse, imagining that you're secretly married to (insert current fantasy sexy actress/model) and that it's alright to stalk her now.

YOUR MIND DOESN'T MAKE IT REAL, trump. THE LAW MAKES IT REAL. And the law says you took documents you had NO RIGHT to take.

Insert GIFs of President Bartlet headdesking to infinity here.

Radioactive

I don't think it's much of a coincidence that a day after a trump-friendly judge tried to halt the Justice Department's investigation into trump's taking and mishandling of classified documents to Mar-A-Lago the FBI lets it drop to the Washington Post that they've already uncovered evidence that trump was mishandling nuclear intel (paywalled): 

A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.

Documents about such highly classified operations require special clearances on a need-to-know basis, not just top-secret clearance. Some special-access programs can have as few as a couple dozen government personnel authorized to know of an operation’s existence. Records that deal with such programs are kept under lock and key, almost always in a secure compartmented information facility, with a designated control officer to keep careful tabs on their location...

After months of trying, according to government court filings, the FBI has recovered more than 300 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago this year: 184 in a set of 15 boxes sent to the National Archives and Records Administration in January, 38 more handed over by a Trump lawyer to investigators in June, and more than 100 additional documents unearthed in a court-approved search on Aug. 8.

It was in this last batch of government secrets, the people familiar with the matter said, that the information about a foreign government’s nuclear-defense readiness was found. These people did not identify the foreign government in question, say where at Mar-a-Lago the document was found or offer additional details about one of the Justice Department’s most sensitive national security investigations...

If I recall since August when the warrant to search Mar-A-Lago took place, commentators were noting that if trump was caught with any kind of classified information on nuclear security, he was in serious legal trouble. As documented by Alex Wellerstein at the Lawfare blog: 

If Trump’s purported declassification of these documents was to be taken seriously, one would expect that there would have to be a record of this somewhere, and that this would also mean that the underlying information in those documents would have to be declassified across the board: not just in those documents, but in any documents that contain them. Depending on what is in those documents, that would be a wide-ranging action with rippling effects as guidelines got updated accordingly. Clearly, it did not have that effect, or the FBI would not have seized them and declared them classified. In effect, Trump’s defense appears to be that the documents were secretly declassified. (editor's note: there is no such thing as double secret probation Secretly Declassified)

For Restricted Data, the power of the president to declassify is even less clear. The updated version of the Atomic Energy Act that is currently on the books has detailed descriptions of how to remove information from the Restricted Data category. That process is initiated by the Department of Energy (as successor to the Atomic Energy Commission), not the president. The only explicit role the president has in this process is that if the Department of Energy and Department of Defense disagree on whether something should be declassified, the president acts as the tie-breaker. The president is given other explicit powers regarding Restricted Data, like the ability to direct the Department of Defense to share it with allied nations under certain circumstances (like planning for mutual defense, such as with NATO), but not declassification. The fact that the law does not explicitly give presidents the power to blanket declassify things, but does give them a role in declassification and other matters regarding Restricted Data, suggests that Congress’s intent was not to allow the president to declassify Restricted Data at will...

Another thing to consider is that trump's storing of these documents at an open Mar-A-Lago violated national security requirements that top secret classified materials need to be detained in secured rooms. Called SCIF - for Sensitive Compartments Information Facility - trump never bothered to put all those classified documents in such a room (there's supposed to have been one installed at Mar-A-Lago, but that's not where the FBI found the classified docs).

One last thing to consider is the speculation about the "nuclear capabilities" materials the FBI found in their August search - these were the documents that trump kept lying about and refused to hand back to National Archives - is that it involved another nation's nuclear secrets. This is where this scandal turns into a diplomatic and military nightmare. 

There's not that many nations with nuclear capabilities - aka World Ending Warheads of Mass Destruction - so the list of suspects is short. Either trump was mishandling secrets that involved an allied nation - The United Kingdom, France, Israel, maybe Pakistan and maybe India - or nations that are in competition (if not open hostility) with us on the global stage - China, Russia, North Korea, and (thanks to trump's gutting of Obama's agreement with them) Iran.

One of those nations has to realize that trump could well have exposed one of their most important security details of their own military. If it's an opposing nation we had intel on, if these documents get back to them they can find out how our nation's intel-gathering works and figure out likely sources and leaks. This means our spies and informants are doomed if they haven't been already, and there's concerns this has already happened. 

If it's an allied nation that's been exposed, they have got to be PISSED at trump, and at us for letting this buffoon of an orange Shitgibbon keep his greasy Cheeto fingers on their most valued secrets. Twitter has been speculating about the possibility of trump trading away Israeli secrets to where Mossad - notoriously trigger-happy - would have to act to defend their nation's safety.

No matter what, our foreign allies have to realize that if trump succeeds in returning to power in 2024, there is no way they can ever trust the United States Intelligence Community with a goddamn thing. We can lose our allies and ruin our ability to defend ourselves.

I'm not a lawyer nor an expert on foreign policy, but I wonder if the nation exposed by trump's betrayal would have the power to call for his arrest and trial in their nation for espionage, if it's possible for them to extradite him, hold him accountable for his failures. If the American legal system won't hold trump accountable, maybe theirs will. 

This situation keeps getting worse for trump, not better. The Justice Department is making it clear to Judge Cannon that she may think she can stall the investigation to save trump, but it's already too late. They've already got enough evidence of federal criminal acts by trump to drop these reports to the national media and make it clear they've got even more details that Cannon and trump can't contain. If she stops the investigation, Fine, DOJ is telling us, we can go to trial with the just the stuff we've already got. 

They've got trump violating the Presidential Records Act. They've got him with 300 classified documents he didn't keep secured and shouldn't have had in the first place. They've got trump hoarding radioactive-hot intel on a nation's nuclear capabilities that he has no power to declassify on his own whim.

In some respects they don't need to wait. The Justice Department can arguably go to a judge in the DC district and file criminal charges on trump whenever they need to. If they're delaying, it's either because they're still considering whether to appeal Cannon's Special Master stunt or they're holding off on any politically explosive decision before the midterm elections.

In some respects they shouldn't wait. Every minute that trump does not answer for the crimes he's documented committing is a minute that justice is denied. Arrest him, charge him, hold him in a tiny jail cell where he can rail and fume only to himself. Let justice be done, goddammit.

Picture This: trump Is Toast

The past couple of days covering the ongoing scandal of donald trump hoarding a number of boxes containing government documents in violation of several laws in the US Code had seen a few twists.

trump's lawyers - some of them newly hired and almost none of them with experience regarding national security matters - had made various court filings insisting on a "Special Master" be assigned by the judge - who happens to be a trump appointee - to go through all the documents seized by the FBI for possible "privileged" information belonging to trump. I'll defer to Emptywheel to explain how wrong the whole thing is:

Yesterday, five days after their first attempt to submit a whack filing asking for (among other things) a Special Master to review the seized documents — but not for attorney-client privilege, but for Executive Privilege (documents that, by definition, belong at the Archives) — and after some polite prodding from an wildly pro-Trump Judge, Aileen Cannon, they submitted their second attempt.

I’m not going to go through it in depth this time... But here are two key details. First, in response to one of the really helpful prods from Judge Cannon, Trump’s lawyers confessed that, no, they hadn’t thought to formally inform DOJ about this lawsuit before she reminded them that’s necessary...

But, two days after she nudged them to do so, Trump’s lawyers decided to call Jay Bratt, and asked him if he’d really like formal notice that they want to sue him to prevent him from doing his job.

He did.

So sometime on Monday, maybe — that’ll be 21 days after the FBI seized 27 boxes from Trump’s hotel, more than three times as long as it took for FBI to find 184 unique pieces of evidence that Trump violated the Espionage Act back in May — DOJ will have formal notice that this is going on, which would be the earliest that Judge Cannon could conceivably say, “Stop what you’re doing!!”

But she won’t, because first she’s going to give DOJ a chance to weigh in, even if on accelerated schedule.

With that in mind, here’s the second point. On their second attempt, Trump’s lawyers managed to ask for the thing they needed to do if they really wanted a Special Master: to ask for an injunction... I’m not sure they’ve made this ask properly. At this point, 18 days after the search, it’s probably not even worth the effort figuring it out. The point, though, is how this will work. 21 days after the search of Trump’s house, 17 days after DOJ told Trump they’re going to pursue some other option to access the stuff already identified as attorney-client privileged (one of which might be asking Reinhart to allow them to access it), and 14 days after Trump started getting stuff — his passports — that was out of scope of the investigation, is the first moment that they will have formally told a judge, “Emergency!!! We need a Special Master!!!”

Emptywheel is spelling out that there's a time limit to these things, and trump's people kept being too slow about it. However: 

Update: Two significant developments. First, Judge Cannon has issued an order to the government — which has not yet been served — to respond to Trump’s motion by Tuesday... Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has told various Committee Chairs and Ranking Members that the IC is conducting a classification review and what sounds like a preliminary damage assessment. That suggests the stolen documents are already out to the agencies.

Update (to the earlier update): In DOJ’s initial response, they’ve noted that the privilege review is already done...

This is basically the lead-up to the Justice Department's filing last night of their response to trump's lawyers asking for a Special Master injunction: You're too slow, it's too late, you're toast. Back again to Emptywheel in a different must-read article about how THAT went:

DOJ’s response to Trump’s request for a Special Master last night did a bunch of things — most notably, debunking lies Trump’s camp had been telling...

In yesterday’s filing, the government demonstrated what properly protecting NDI looks like in practice. The example that has — deservedly — gotten the most attention is the description of case agents and National Security Division attorneys having to get additional clearances to access this information.

In some instances, even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys conducting the review required additional clearances before they were permitted to review certain documents...

In short, "this stuff was so classified our people had to get extra super-clearance just to do their jobs of finding out just what the hell happened." Back to Emptywheel:

DOJ also described that the classified materials that have been seized have been segregated and properly stored.

All of the classified documents seized in the August 8 search have been segregated from the rest of the seized documents and are being separately maintained and stored in accordance with appropriate procedures for handling and storing classified information.

DOJ intends that these special protections will extend to these court proceedings: DOJ demanded that if Judge Cannon decides to appoint a Special Master, she pick someone who is already cleared at the TS/SCI level...

There's not a lot of those to begin with, and not a lot of them who would be favorable to trump after all the damage he's done. Above all, what Emptywheel is pointing to is the reality that the FBI has already had enough to time to sort the documents to where they had already filtered out anything that could be construed as "privileged" for trump, which shouldn't have been that much to begin with.

Thrown in for the judge's review were various photographs documenting just how the FBI served their warrant and how the found the classified materials at Mar-A-Lago. See this?

Pictured provided by the Department of Justice,
shared via AP Newswire

Remember the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words"? Here's the proof. These are documents reportedly recovered from trump's personal office - which was not a secured room - five of which are listed TOP SECRET, most of them with redactions covering certain pages to confirm that these are documents still considered classified.

Other than half of social media pointing out how hideous trump's choice of carpeting was, the other half of social media made up of lawyers and former/current military intelligence officers were pointing out how damaging this evidence is. 

I'm with Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice about how damaging this is:

It does make Trump look bad, and that’s because he is bad. There’s no plausible excuse for taking the documents in the first place, refusing to turn them over when requested, returning some documents and concealing others and lying about that.

But aside from that, I’m so glad the photo was included because, contra Turley, some people really do need you to draw a picture for them, and the court isn’t the only audience here...

More broadly, the picture is a signal that DOJ lawyers understand exactly who they’re dealing with and how he has squirmed out of so many past jams. Trump is a squid who emits ink clouds of lies and chaos to escape danger. A picture cuts through all that bullshit...

At every turn in this saga, Trump did what you’d expect him to do — lie, bluster, rabble rouse, dispatch shoddy weasels to obfuscate on TV — and the DOJ cut him off at the knees every time. It’s not rocket surgery to predict what he’ll do, and not even a mouth as big as Tangerine Baal’s can ingest dozens of boxes of paper, so there was going to be evidence...

If you read closer - both the actual DOJ filings and the mood of the whole situation - you might notice that trump is running out of time (as well as places to hide). In the DOJ filing itself, the department asks that if Judge Cannon does play along with trump's demands and appoint a Special Master that she does so by specific calendar deadlines: Provide a list of candidates for the department to approve by September 7 (a week from now) and ensure the Special Master complete review by September 30 (end of the month).

Attorney General Garland does not want trump to play the DELAY DELAY DELAY game like he always does. There is an unstated implication that the Justice Department has already gathered enough evidence to find criminal charges against trump and others who may have helped him violate the US Code covering Presidential Records, Espionage, and Obstruction.

It's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN.

The only thing saving trump now is this court review for a Special Master, but even that won't be long enough to reach 2023 if it happens. The next best thing saving trump is the courtesy the Justice Department gives political figures during election cycles by holding off on any criminal charges or reveling any investigations so as to avoid influencing voter turnout. (FBI Director Comey violated that courtesy when he reported Hillary's emails were under review back in 2016, and there's solid evidence it affected media coverage and voter turnout, and Comey's been eating shit for that ever since). trump himself is not up for a vote but he is a dominant leader of the Republican Party, so the courtesy applies.

So trump may have some time between now and November 8 to breathe a little. After the votes are counted, he's gonna be running for cover like a Thanksgiving turkey, and he may even be eating that meal in a jail cell awaiting his bail hearing.

Let Justice Be Done, everybody.

All Which Wicked Designs (w/ Update)

All which wicked designs, wars, and evil practices of him, the said Charles Stuart, have been, and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people of this nation, by and from whom he was entrusted as aforesaid.

-- "The Charge Against the King," published 1648 

One of the thoughts that's come to me this week as we look at the growing evidence that Donald Trump, former President of the United States, betrayed his oath of office - by taking executive papers that did not belong to him, and treating the classified documents he took with him in such brazen ways at his private resort where such secrets were exposed - is that we've never had someone with such high rank abuse the powers of the Presidency in so gross a manner.

None of the other Presidents were this horrifying in their cluelessness, their ignorance of federal laws, their disdain for the Constitutional limits of the office needed to ensure our government worked for the people it served. In our modern era, for all that Democrats could rail about the likes of Richard Nixon (who was caught abusing power), Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush, none of them could be accused of being national security risks on the scale trump is behaving. For all that Republicans could rail about the likes of John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, none of them ever came close to getting investigated for violating our national security on the scale trump already is (and in Clinton and Obama's cases, the GOP really tried to dig through the dirt).

Because that's what we're all seeing today from the court-ordered release of the affidavit that led to the FBI search warrant at Mar-A-Lago earlier this month (which Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice labeled today as Happy Redacted Affidavit Day). All frivolity and schadenfreude aside, the affidavit even in its redacted form revealed a lot of incredible (and horrifying) details, some of which Emptywheel went into detail at her site:

The affidavit spends three paragraphs describing how, after NARA made a referral on February 9, 2022, the FBI opened an investigation to learn:

• How classified documents were removed from the White House
• Whether the storage facilities at Mar-a-Lago were suitable for storing classified materials
• Whether there were anymore classified documents at Mar-a-Lago or elsewhere
• Who had removed and retained the documents in unauthorized spaces

In a probable cause paragraph, it explains that there were 15 boxes with classified information at Mar-a-Lago and there was probable cause to believe there were more.

There’s a redacted paragraph that may describe the basis for suspecting obstruction. A later sentence in the probable cause paragraph describes that there likely will be evidence of obstruction at MAL.

The affidavit explains that this is an investigation into (among other things) 18 USC 793e — which I was among the first people to predict. This means that DOJ maintains that Trump was not authorized to have these documents...

One of Trump's consistent defenses he throws out there on social media and through his lawyers is how his status as President - even as a former President - means he can keep "his" documents and to hell what the Presidential Records Act says. What the Justice Department is setting out in the affidavit is that NO, when it comes to classified documents even former Presidents do not have that authority (and arguably that they shouldn't be abusing that authority when they are sitting in the Oval Office). Just what sort of documents did the FBI find trump was hoarding? As Emptywheel noted:

It does have paragraphs defining:

• 18 USC 793(e), the Espionage Act
• EO 13526, the Executive Order governing classified information
• Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret classifications
• Secure Compartmented Information
• Special Intelligence, which is SIGINT
• HCS, which refers to clandestine human spying
• FISA
• NOFORN, material not permissible to share with foreign governments
• Originator Controlled, meaning whoever created controls it
• Need to know
• 32 CFR Parts 2001 and 2003 which describes the Storage requirements for classified information
• 18 USC 1519, obstruction
• 18 USC 2071, willfully removing information
• 44 USC 2201, the Presidential Records Act
• 44 USC 3301(a), the Federal Records Act

The stuff I highlighted in bold are the ones most troubling regarding national security matters. HCS is also known as "Clandestine Human Intel": Ever see the first Mission Impossible movie? That's the NOC List we're talking about. 

Ever hear of a fellow named Richard Welch? He worked as a CIA operative, specifically in Greece, at the height of the Cold War. In 1975, a former CIA agent published a book naming names, Welch among them, and a month after the book came out Welch was assassinated by Greek insurgents. Leaking the names of operatives can get them killed. NOC (Non-Official Cover) agents are those deep in high-risk operations, where getting exposed would compromise them at best and at most get them killed. For Trump to have such lists in his possession is a serious breach of security.

Trump also had FISA and NOFORN documents. FISA relates to NSA search warrants to track overseas communications: Those docs could expose to any foreign power who among their officials and citizens might be under U.S. surveillance. NOFORN are documents our government doesn't want foreign government - even our allies - seeing as it might compromise our dealings among them. It's literally in the description: NOT PERMISSIBLE TO SHARE. Given the number of foreign "friends" and business allies Trump has, what are the odds any of them got a chance to see NOFORN documents?

Half of these documents are not even supposed to leave certain rooms of certain buildings, that's how sensitive that information can get. How the hell did Trump and his lackeys get their hands on them and take those docs to Mar-A-Lago in the first place...?

And if you'll note the part that says 32 CFR pt. 2001 and 2003 describing storage requirements for classified information, the FBI was mortified that not only did Trump have all these classified documents at his luxury resort Mar-A-Lago, he didn't store them properly at all. The warrant search revealed trump had documents intermixed with others, kept in different rooms across the place, even in trump's bedroom and closets. Anybody could have seen any of it. And given the lapses in security at Mar-A-Lago - not just the Chinese showing up during trump's Presidency but a Russian-born immigrant with fake IDs in the last few days! - there's even the likelihood documents got walked off by people who had no legal authority to even look at them.

If Trump was so eager to keep all of "his" documents, he showed almost no care in treating them with any concern for our nation's safety.

Which leads to the Big Question, as asked by Digby over at her blog:

What was he doing with those documents?

It appears that some of the information they retrieved was extremely sensitive. He kept Human, Signals, and FISA intelligence in an unsecure location for over a year, some of it in a container at the bottom of his closet. WTF????

One of the latest excuses is that he was writing his “memoirs” or preparing for his presidential library. There is zero evidence that he is “writing” anything (he always employed a ghost writer anyway) and there are no plans for a presidential library. It seems obvious that he had some kind of ulterior motive and I’m no longer convinced that it had to do with him wanting to show off his presidential memorabilia to his sycophants. I think he either thought he could cover up his own deeds by taking the documents or that he was preparing to rain down vengeance on his enemies and reward his friends. That’s how he operates...

As Digby notes, there are multiple reasons Trump took these documents. One is how a number of documents could expose his own criminal misdeeds before he took office and then during his tenure. The DOJ does accuse Trump of obstructing ongoing federal investigations (the 1519 claim), which could cover anything from his involvement in the January 6th Insurrection to anything related to his ties to Russia or other foreign agents. The other reason has to be Trump's desire to profit from his access: he is massively in debt and indebted to other nations who propped up his overseas businesses and his flailing administration.

Remember this always: Trump does what he does to benefit himself, no one else. If he has to expose our nation's biggest military and foreign policy secrets to enrich himself, Trump will do that in a heartbeat. And there's every likelihood he already has.

This is why I can't imagine any other President sinking to the levels of betrayal that we're finding trump this evening. Even the worst Presidents we can think of - Harding, Nixon, Tyler, Buchanan, Grant, Andrew Johnson, LBJ - when it comes to corruption and misbehavior in the White House never even came close to threatening to sell out our nation's secrets in the way Trump threatens to do.

The closest examples I can even think of in our American history goes back to our days as a British colony, back to the days of Charles I, who sought to rule the United Kingdom with The Divine Right of Kings to indulge his own anger and ego, who tried to bully his way over Parliament and did so badly it led to their Civil War and to his dethronement (and execution when he kept betraying Parliament by making secret deals with Scotland, which won't be unified with England until 1707).

Trump is behaving in the same bullying manner as Charles I: demanding an Executive Privilege he no longer holds; spreading the big lie of still being President even after his Popular Vote and Electoral loss in 2020, stirring up calls for Civil War that could spill the blood of thousands of Americans; insisting that the laws of Presidential records and national security do not apply to him.

In times like this, one thinks back to what Patrick Henry said about our nation's need to free itself from the tyranny of the likes of Charles I, and how our legal system MUST step up and hold Trump to account for his acts against America's defense and well-being.

Update 7/27/23: Well this is a bit of a shock. I had submitted this article to the FWA Royal Palm Literary Awards, but worried this was a bit too wordy and hyperbolic to get considered. But it made Semi-Finalist status!

Update 8/31/23: This is an even bigger stunner. Today I got word from the Royal Palm judges that this article reached FINALIST status! This means I could be up for the top three awards in the Non-Fiction - Blogging category this October at the Florida Writers Association Awards ceremony. This was one of the few I quibbled over - "War Crimes" and "Dreading the Oncoming Storm" I thought were home runs, but alas - but it's turning into a well-received essay.

We will see how things play out this October. Thank you all by the by for following this blog!

Update 10/22/23: This article received the GOLD achievement for this year's Royal Palm Literary Awards for Nonfiction - Published Blog or Article!

This is an incredible moment for me, and I'm grateful that this work has been chosen (mutters "Still think 'War Crimes' is more passionate though) by the FWA judges.

Just to mention, this article is going to be part of a published collection I'm currently working on, so this is something nice I can add into the book cover and blurb info. ;-)

Justice Is Not a Game, Yet trump Is Still Losing (w/ Update)

(Update: Thanks to Batocchio for sharing this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Here's hoping we all survive this trumpian mess...)

The reaction to Monday's warranted search of donald trump's Mar-A-Lago resort for classified documents just keeps ratcheting upward to new levels of wingnut farce and legal resolve.

Due to trump publicly denouncing the FBI search as "a raid" and implying that the whole thing was improper, Attorney General Merrick Garland came out this afternoon at a press conference to inform the media that A) He himself signed off on getting the warrant, B) the warrant was necessary after months of delays and denials by trump about the stolen documents, C) there were national security concerns about those documents, and that D) in order to prove all that, the Department of Justice was putting in a request to unseal the portions of the warrant - stuff already known to trump and his lawyers - to the general public as trump "insisted" they should know.

You could kind of hear a large "Oh CRAP" scream halfway across the state of Florida emanating from the shores of Palm Beach at the moment Garland called trump's bluff.

trump, you see, loves playing the victim as much as playing a hero. As long as the FBI and Justice Department kept their investigations into his activities under wraps, trump could complain to his rabid voting base that he's being targeted for a partisan "witch hunt" and that he's the noble suffering martyr to the wingnut cause.

By making the move to unseal the warrant they gave trump's lawyers, the Justice Department is going to reveal exactly HOW they got the warrant, WHAT it focused on finding, WHY it had to happen, and above all discredit all the Far Right media allegations of 'planted' evidence and agency 'misconduct'. trump can no longer play the victim when that happens: At that point, the warrant is going to reveal WHO is a criminal suspect (hint: his nickname rhymes with 'Gitshibbon').

Let's go to legal expert Emptywheel for her take on today's bombshell:

But (Garland)’s not asking to unseal the whole warrant application.

On the contrary. He’s only unsealing precisely the documents that Trump already has in his possession: the warrant itself and Appendices A (describing this house) and B (describing what can be seized). Indeed, the motion notes that the FBI gave Trump these documents...

These documents are precisely the ones that Trump could have released all by himself, but chose not to. He could object now. But if he did, it would make clear — as if all the refusals to release it to journalists hasn’t already — that it’s really damning.

And now — in a short announcement where he took no questions, but where Garland made a fierce defense of DOJ and the FBI — Garland is calling Trump’s bluff...

trump can't afford to let the warrant go public, because it'll reveal that the FBI has legitimate reasons to search Mar-A-Lago in the first place. But trump's made so much noise about it already that if he turns around and demands the warrant be kept private, he'll be admitting to the public that he's in deep legal trouble anyway.

For his entire adult life, donald trump has played the legal system like a game. he avoided accountability for his criminal and civil misdeeds ever since he was a corrupt NYC landlord in the 1970s. trump played the bankruptcy rules like a lark keeping himself afloat while screwing his creditors, running his casinos into the ground and repeatedly pushing his business empire into more questionable - if not outright criminal - actions.

As long as he kept his army of lawyers well-paid and aggressively hounding his victims into despair, trump had no respect for anything or anyone (other than the dictators he admired as powerful men who answered to no one, like he wants to be).

Thing is, trump seems to have crossed a serious line here. While he got away with bending breaking the rules about national security as he sat in the White House, the second trump got kicked out of office he became accountable for all the documents he stole and all the secret intel he's likely exposed.

trump's still trying to play all of this like a game only he is allowed to win.

But he's playing against a federal government that no longer answers to him, that no longer lets him cheat. The Justice Department apparently could tolerate trump's decades of business fraud, the agency had to tolerate the damage he did when he became President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice), but the rule of law has to kick in now that trump is breaking laws - possibly committing acts of espionage - that cannot be shrugged away.

All that's left now is for AG Garland to tell trump to his face "Game Over."

Not Only Did trump Piss Off Archivists, He May Have Violated National Security

Following up on the big story about the FBI's warrant to recover materials at Mar-A-Lago.

It always helps to follow Emptywheel: A good place IMHO to check on any legal matters. With regards to trump's legal woes over the warrant and seizure at his luxury resort/fake home this past Monday, she's pointing out a few things of interest:

1) The Department of Justice visited trump at Mar-A-Lago back in June to discuss additional boxes of documents he failed to turned over earlier this February (he was forced to hand over 15 boxes back then). There were apparently attempts to subpoena for the documents - a means to get trump to voluntarily return the papers as part of an ongoing investigation into what happened - but trump refused. It seems these papers were so important to him that he wouldn't give them up... and they were so valuable to him he wouldn't shred them either, meaning the DOJ had to get the warrant to get those docs back.

2) As discussed earlier about the Presidential Records Act of 1978, trump wasn't supposed to flee the White House with any documents at all (they were supposed to go to National Archives), and yet he did so in January 2021. trump has also been documented destroying papers during his time in the Oval Office, meaning he's violated the US Code in multiple ways when it comes to concealing, destroying, or mutilating documents.

3) The documents in question were verified back in February of being "Classified" in nature, meaning trump's ongoing possession of them became a national security risk. Turns out, when Biden became President he refused to give trump clearance to receive any more intelligence briefings (ex-Presidents may retain the privilege in case the current President needs to consult with them on ongoing matters. It is after all a very exclusive club...). Whatever security status trump had between 2016 to 2020 no longer applies, meaning his possession of those boxes of documents were illegal, and above all he had no authority to share those documents (which the DOJ investigation may have found out, hence the urgency to get that warrant).

Remember kids: While trump served as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice), trump behaved rather... poorly with national security intel. He revealed in 2017 a then-undercover operation shared between US Intelligence and Israel's Mossad to a pair of Russian buddies, which blew the operation and may have risked the lives of Mossad agents. He later gloated in 2019 over a failed Iranian rocket launch by sharing a top-secret high-orbital photograph of the launch site, which exposed our nation's intelligence gathering capabilities. THAT was so egregiously stupid it enraged Adam L Silverman - a paid professional expert on foreign intel - at Balloon-Juice to infinity and beyond. Yet in spite of the security blunders, trump was untouchable because there was a standing policy that the President - as Commander-in-Chief - can declassify anything he likes. As Silverman noted "...the President can just put classified information out there, claim he has the right to do it, even if it hasn’t been formerly and properly declassified, and he faces no jeopardy and the rest of us with clearances do, it is because THE RULES WERE NOT CONCEIVED OF AND WRITTEN WITH (trump) IN MIND!!!!! NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM!!!! The assumption was, based on historic performance of previous presidents, that NO FUTURE PRESIDENT WOULD BE THIS STUPID AND CARELESS!!!!"

Once out of office, however (and THANK GOD), trump no longer has that power to declassify a damn thing. Meaning if he DID do that with any of those 15 actually 25 no wait it's been bumped up to 27 (!) boxes of national security documents he took to Mar-A-Lago, he could be in real serious trouble.

According to Emptywheel, trump's handling of those docs at Mar-A-Lago might involve violating 18 US Code sect.793, Gathering, Transmitting or Losing Defense Information (!), specifically part e). Whoa, what:

Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it... Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both...

In short: If trump even offered to share any one of those classified documents to another person - especially to a foreign agent - he's toast. That trump failed to deliver those documents to the officer/employee of the United States entitled to receive it (cough National Archivist cough) means he's toast.

That trump resisted to deliver the entirety of the remaining boxes he basically stole from the White House from June onward tells this observer that trump intended to willfully communicate, deliver, transit those documents to any person not entitled to receive them. Which could not only mean adversarial nations like Russia getting access to them, but even allied nations like Saudi Arabia (there are things at some point we dare not share with allies due to competing economic and foreign policy interests).

Even Emptywheel has her concerns:

Trump is such a psychopath that the answer to this might normally be in question. After all, he routinely treated top secret intelligence like it was toilet paper or party favors for visiting Russians.

Except DOJ went to Trump’s residence in June and told him this information could harm the US. Then they wrote him a letter, saying that it could harm the US and could he please put a padlock on the basement room that had, up until that point, been accessible to all the suspected foreign assets who’ve paid the price of admission to Mar-a-Lago...

Again, DOJ asked and asked and asked. Trump exhibited awareness the Archives were asking. He stopped in to say “hi!” when Jay Bratt, the head of DOJ’s espionage section, came to visit. And he still hoarded the document.

This may be why Trump claims that nothing was in the hotel safe in his bridal suite, by the way. Keeping these documents at Mar-a-Lago was willful by itself. But keeping such documents in his safe would be proof that he, personally, was hoarding it.

If the FBI really did scoop up highly sensitive documents when they were at Mar-a-Lago the other day, then there may be relatively few steps left to charging him — aside from cataloging the 12 new boxes of stolen documents. DOJ may only need permission from the agencies that own these documents to make the declassifications required to prosecute it.

By going to Mar-a-Lago and asking for these documents in person on June 3, DOJ made it very easy to prove that Trump had been asked, but refused, to give any classified documents found in Trump’s possession on Monday back...

Again, in short: trump is toast. It's now a question of how soon the Justice Dept. can declassify enough of what trump had in possession and whether Attorney General Merrick Garland - who has, after more than a year of seeming inaction, revealed he had the DOJ doing exactly what it needed to do - will file charges on a former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) in a criminal proceeding our nation has never seen before.

Then again, we've never had a crook like trump in the White House before. trump's violations of national security, and disdain for executive responsibility, above all refusal to adhere to decent common sense brought us to this crisis. The partisan outrage may explode - literally - but for the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, Garland, trump is an ongoing threat to all of us. You HAVE to make this a matter for the courts, and trump HAS to answer to the law for the damage he's done (and still doing).

Who's Dat Knocking At Mar-A-Lago? It's the Feds With a Warrant, Go Figure (w/ Update)

I was planning on blogging tonight about the victory lap President Biden and the Senate Democrats could enjoy this week after having passed major legislation that guarantees most of what Biden promised in 2020 would get done...

But then news broke early this evening about something more Schadenfreude-licious (ever so tasty), so I decided to distract myself with some malicious joy instead.

Apparently, mister donald trump, former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) is upset as hell tonight because FBI agents bearing a warrant to search Mar-A-Lago showed up and seized evidence, although it's not yet clear exactly what the investigation was looking for.

To Deepa Shivaram and Ryan Lucas at NPR for more:

Former President Donald Trump said on Monday that FBI agents had searched his Mar-a-Lago club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., and opened his safe.

The FBI and Department of Justice declined to comment, although the department is known to be investigating the possible mishandling of government secrets after the National Archives retrieved White House records from Mar-a-Lago

The search, which would have required a court order from a federal judge, signals the president is under greater scrutiny from federal investigators than was previously known...

As they note, a warrant means a federal judge had to sign off on this raid. And the only way the feds can do that is present enough existing evidence of wrong-doing to justify entering a location - be it home for trump or a resort business also for trump - and search for specific things. The fact his safe was targeted meant the FBI had evidence there was something there relevant to an ongoing investigation.

While Shivaram and Lucas point out that the Justice Department does have an ongoing investigation focusing on mishandled government documents - and Mar-A-Lago is where trump hid 15 boxes from NARA after he left the White House in January 2021 - there are other possible investigations at play here:

Monday's action also comes as the Justice Department was ramping up its investigations into Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — though there have not been reports of an investigation into Trump himself...

The ongoing House Committee investigation into the January 6th Insurrection has reportedly been sharing information - and referring materials for official investigation - with Justice, implying there is at least a federal grand jury digging into possible criminal charges into trump and his handlers for their involvement in the rioting that day.

One avenue of investigation the DoJ is reportedly working on are the efforts by some of trump's allies in various Red states where Biden won of organizing "Fake Electors" to trick the state legislatures into approving their set of Electors instead of Biden's. Wisconsin and Arizona in particular are under scrutiny, and there had been reports that trump was in direct contact with some of those organizers.

And of course, there's the taxes thing. Not just any investigation by the IRS into trump's financials, but also recent revelations that trump allegedly ordered the IRS to harass former administrative figures like James Comey and Andy McCabe, FBI officials whom trump fired when they wouldn't swear fealty to him.

With all this going on, of course trump is jumping onto social media to proclaim his innocence and how this is all a partisan witch-hunt. Of course the Far Right - Fox Not-News is reportedly enflamed with rage tonight - is screaming that the FBI is persecuting trump for political reasons (did one of the crazy congresscritters insist that the FBI should be dissolved for this?). They're all insisting that something like this has never happened to a former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) before.

That's kind of true. The FBI has never gone after ex-Presidents before. Even the likes of Richard Nixon who was facing impeachment for serious federal crimes never had his personal safe hit with a warrant search. Then again, we've never had an openly corrupt and crooked ex-President like donald fucking trump before.

None of the others in recent history - not LBJ (and he had some dirty secrets to hide), not Nixon, not Ford, not Carter, not Reagan, not Bush the Elder, not even Bill Clinton who was under near-constant investigation due to Whitewater (and who faced public scandal regarding Lewinsky), not Bush the Lesser, not Obama in spite of all the screaming by the Far Right he was guilty of something - had personally violated so many laws while in office (with Reagan and Bush the Lesser overseeing some corrupt and broken administrations). Worse, none of them had violated so many laws while leaving office.

Any expectation that any former President should be exempt from criminal investigation is a fantasy (the OLC ruling about sitting Presidents being exempt is just when they're in office. Once out, they are exposed to liability as long as the clock on statute of limitations are ticking). No one person is above the law, and if trump broke any laws - and there's at least four things under investigation now that points to a solid "MAYBE" - then By God the FBI is going to show up knocking at the door with a warrant in hand.

There is always the fear in politics than a partisan autocrat - a wannabe dictator in the Jacksonian (and now trumpian) mold - would abuse the powers of the Justice Department and agencies like the FBI into hounding political opponents with unjustified "criminal" probes.

But as tonight's revelations are showing, the current Biden administration under Attorney General Garland isn't playing rough with those rules. Everything about the warrant search is by-the-book: The agents presented a case to a judge and that judge signed the warrant. It's not as though Biden himself penciled in the warrants or Garland rubber-stamping something, or even the FBI smashing the doors in without a warrant at all.

And given the sensitivity, nay the severity of the situation - the judge HAD to know issuing a warrant on a former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) would raise legal questions - the feds still went through with it.

Let me just say this: I'm not fearing the FBI knocking on my door - or smashing it down - because I know I'm not breaking any laws that warrant their attention.

This is happening because there is solid evidence donald trump broke various laws, and there was evidence today he possessed additional proof of his misdeeds that required this "home/business" search.

The Far Right outrage will be out of control over this, we're seeing the first wave of it tonight. But let justice be done though the heavens fall. 

trump's been laughing at the legal system for 50 years. It's way past time to hold him accountable to the law.

Unleash all the schadenfreude this night, people. Let the popcorn pop and the wine flow.

(Update 8/9): It's turning out the warrant search IS in relation to the National Archives investigation. Speculation is no longer wondering if trump kept possession of highly classified documents after he was supposed to hand them over ('cause he clearly and illegally kept them): Speculation is now ruminating if trump exposed those documents to a third party (which is when the seriousness of this kicks to the next level up), and who tipped off the feds that trump still had these papers (which suggests someone real close to him just ratted trump out big time).

The likelihood of donald trump getting charged for violating the Presidential Records Act just went from "Toss Up" to "Leans Yes."

(pops open another champagne bottle)