Question: How Many Stolen American Secrets Is Donald Trump Still Harboring?

Because we just found out about four more.

May 22, 2024

Today, rock bottom MAGA Americans are confused and scared and confused and angry and confused over an entirely imaginary story that Joe Biden ordered Donald Trump assassinated that day the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for the stolen and classified American secrets Trump stole from the government and refused to give back.

It’s a useful lie for Trump and other influential Republicans, because they know with 100 percent accuracy that they don’t have one single voter with the curiosity or understanding of how the world works to try to check out if their story even makes sense.

The origin story for the lie came from newly unsealed documents in the classified docs case, which simply referred to the FBI following the same protocol it always follows when it does literally anything.

But in those same unsealed documents, we also learn that oh by the way, Donald Trump’s lawyers also found four more stolen classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, long after the Mar-a-Lago search, long after they had pinky sweared a million times that there were no stolen docs left. These were in Trump’s bedroom.

Which leads us to a lot of questions, but most importantly:

Was Donald Trump Masturbating On These Documents?

Any reporter worth ONE SOLITARY FUCK would ask, and Americans deserve to know, since the documents Trump stole are, by definition, the people’s property.

Unfortunately, there are no reporters like that in America, so we’ll talk about other important aspects of the story.

No, Really, Though. This Is Serious, And Fucking Unbelievable.

Back before Aileen Cannon, this season’s winner of “The Judicial Apprentice,” was allowed to start rubbing her smelly little fingers all over this case, the grand jury investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith was overseen in DC by District Judge Beryl Howell. The ruling in question is from March 2023, long after the Mar-a-Lago raid, which happened in August 2022. Trump’s lawyers found these jizzy bedroom docs in December.

It’s an 87-page ruling, granting government prosecutors’ motion to subpoena two Trump lawyers under the crime fraud exception — you know, the one that says you can shove your attorney-client privilege inside your bunghole if we’re talking about attorney-client communications that happened in furtherance of a crime.

This is the key bit of the ruling, emphasis ours:

To be sure, the government has not provided direct evidence that the former president deliberately retained, or was even aware of, the particular classified-marked documents located by his counsel at Mar-a-Lago in December 2022. Again, if the uncovering of these four classified-marked documents, even combined with the inaccurate June 3, 3022 Certification, were the only evidence of the former president's retention of classified documents, the government would have failed to make a prima facie showing of willfulness. That is not the limited scope of the factual record before this Court, however. Notably, no excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago.

Uh huh.

It’s unclear how extremely important these documents were, but the point is that they were part of what had been subpoenaed and requested time and time and time again, and that this was all part of Trump’s game of hiding documents from his lawyers. As Howell writes:

The government has sufficiently demonstrated all three elements of this obstruction statute by providing evidence that the former president intentionally concealed the existence of additional documents bearing classification markings from [PERSON 18 AKA Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran] knowing that such deception would result in [PERSON 18] providing an unknowingly false representation to the government.

It’s kind of funny, because these documents now being unsealed are parts of bullshit motions from Trump lawyers in Aileen Cannon’s courtroom, as they whine about “prosecutorial misconduct” and demand that the entire case be dismissed. They thought these filings would help them, because of one tiny thing Howell wrote that suggested a prosecutor might have acted slightly improperly this one time.

Instead we got all this new dirt.

And that’s not the only fun revealed in these unsealed documents:

Buried in the supporting documentation for one of the motions was a document that contained a new public revelation: Once Trump realized that security cameras at Mar-a-Lago could capture his employees moving classified government information that officials were attempting to retrieve, he allegedly ensured that they would avoid the cameras when moving boxes.

Just more Trump obstruction of justice that’s not yet part of any indictments. Cool thing for Jack Smith to have up his sleeve.

Again, these are the same documents that contained the reprint of standard FBI policy on all searches, which Donald Trump and his allies are now using to scream to his ignorant idiot followers that Joe Biden literally had him assassinated. (“I nearly escaped death,” his campaign email wrote, because they are bad at words.)

Trump Hiding Any More Stolen Docs?

And will we ever know?

We think that’s some important information, as we have never for one second believed the FBI was able to get everything that day at Mar-a-Lago — and they never did search the New Jersey trash palace to which Trump flew after coconspirator Walt Nauta loaded the bankers boxes onto his trashy plane — and these unsealed filings don’t reassure us any more.

Anything in the tomb with Ivana in Jersey? What about the kids’ houses? What about other Trump associates? Any mysterious faxes and/or late night shipments to other Trump properties that haven’t been raided? Or perhaps straight to Russia or Saudi Arabia, to save time?

We are just asking questions, and we hope Jack Smith is too.

OPEN THREAD.

[ruling / Washington Post]