Trump Hid Stolen Documents In Bedroom, Probably Under Pile Of Soiled Depends
A federal judge sees more evidence of conspiracy and obstruction.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one: Donald Trump’s lawyers stepped on their own dicks. Again.
The dick-stepping was perhaps inevitable, given the context. But yr Wonkette (motto: NOT A LAWYER) thinks that if you are trying to get a federal criminal case dismissed, perhaps you do not want to unseal a ruling from a federal judge saying there is lots and lots of evidence that your client is extra-super-duper guilty of crimes. And then laying out that evidence in exquisite detail.
No, perhaps you’d rather let that puppy stay under seal, as it had been for over a year, instead of getting it out into the news media where the story can be revived and potential jurors can read Judge Beryl Howell’s opinion. Maybe you would not like those potential jurors to hear that Trump’s lawyers were, for one example, finding classified documents in his bedroom four months after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022 — six months after Trump’s lawyers signed a legal certification declaring that they had turned over all classified documents.
From Howell’s opinion:
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. Instead, the government has provided evidence to demonstrate that the full arc of the criminal violation had already concluded more than six months before this search of Mar-a-Lago, when the evidence demonstrates that the former president intentionally failed to provide all of the classified documents in his possession to the government with the June 3, 2022 Certification.
But we’re not the legal geniuses who have gotten Halfwit Hitler this far in his document-stealing case, so what do we know.
The unsealing occurred on Tuesday, when Trump’s lawyers filed a motion in Judge Aileen Cannon’s courtroom to dismiss the case. The motion was titled “Motion to Dismiss the Indictment Based on Selective and Vindictive Prosecution” and filled with a lot of Trump’s usual whataboutism over other presidents’ handling of classified documents. (The story of Bill Clinton and his sock drawer makes an appearance despite its irrelevance.) Trump’s lawyers attached a copy of Howell’s 87-page ruling to their motion for some reason.
Howell had written the document in response to a request from Special Counsel Jack Smith to depose a Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, before a grand jury. Corcoran was advising the former president during the period when Trump’s minions were playing keep-away with boxes of classified documents that the government was trying to get back.
From Kim Wehle at The Bulwark:
If the government can make a prima facie (on-its-face) showing that Trump committed a crime or fraud, and that his communications with his lawyer furthered the criminal scheme, the [attorney-client] privilege is gone. Howell found the crime-fraud exception was established in this case.
Wehle’s argument is that this new ruling establishes plenty of evidence that Trump was directing the entire scheme to hide all the documents he stole from the government, and to give the FBI as little as possible when it raided his dime-store Xanadu in Florida. She breaks Trump’s transgressions down into two crimes. The first is the “unauthorized retention of national defense information.” That is where Trump had classified documents in his bedroom with his copy of Mein Kampf and his Swedish Made Penis Enlarger Pump:
Trump knew the FBI’s subsequent search was to be limited to a storage room. From May 22 to June 1, a “witness” moved over sixty boxes to his bedroom. Trump “told [him] to put them in the room” apparently because “Trump wanted to pick from them.” Moreover, “Security camera footage reveals that box movement began on May 22, 2022,” with a witness moving sixty-four boxes from an anteroom into a storage room between May 24 and June 1, 2022.
There are a lot of great details here about the careless handling of the boxes of documents, including an accounting of the exact times when security cameras caught Trump’s staff leaving boxes outside the door of his private suite. Apparently they took somewhere around 64 boxes to Trump’s suite for his review in the days after the subpoena was served, and then returned only 25 or 30 to the storage room. The rest they seem to have scattered around — some back to the government, some to a rented storage locker, some onto an airplane bound for a certain New Jersey trash palace which was never searched, and so on.
The second crime Wehle notes is “obstruction of the grand jury investigation” and sums it up like this:
Howell relied on the false June 3, 2022 certification by lawyer Christina Bobb that Trump had turned over all the records when he had not. Howell found that Trump knew that his team “intended to inform the government that the responsive documents located in the storage room provided a comprehensive response to the May 2022 Subpoena—a representation that the former president, for the reasons already detailed, knew to be wrong.”
The government called the whole thing a “shell game,” which is correct. It was the world’s dumbest game of three-card monte, if the dealer had short, stubby fingers lacking anything we’d refer to as dexterity.
One irony here is that the public had heard about this ruling once before, when it was leaked to ABC News a year ago. Which is several eternities in news cycles. The document had long since fallen into that black hole of gross revelations about Trump’s conduct that are so numerous that they have ceased to shock anyone.
Now it’s back in the news. No wonder the wingnuts have spent the last two days screaming that the documents revealed Sleepy Joe Biden ordered the FBI to summarily execute Trump during the Mar-a-Lago raid. Anything to distract from the actual crimes revealed here.
Help keep Wonkette going with a small donation to the local liquor store where we’ve run up one hell of a tab.
What are the odds we are going to start hearing about Hillary and the "acid washed server" from the usual suspects by the end of the weekend? I'd say pretty good, because there's no other way to "both sides" treason besides making shit up from whole cloth.
Time to break out that Doonesbury comic -- again!
https://readingdoonesbury.com/2017/10/25/this-week-in-doonesbury-guilty-guilty-guilty/