Whineapalooza 2023
"HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG?"
Igor Derysh, Salon, June 6, 2023
Former President Donald Trump lashed out on Truth Social Monday as his lawyers met with special counsel Jack Smith in an attempt to avert a possible indictment.
Trump attorneys James Trusty, Lindsey Halligan and John Rowley met with Smith and DOJ officials for about two hours on Monday as they made their case that the government should not criminally charge the former president, according to The Washington Post [and CNN]. Two Trump advisers told the Post they are preparing for a potential indictment in the coming weeks and that the meeting did not change their expectations.
“It’s possible that their lout of a client insisted that the lawyers waste their meeting with general grievances about prosecutorial misconduct that already have been rejected by the courts,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. . . .
Trump, meanwhile, has been busy posting in all caps on his social media platform over the past 24 hours.
“HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP - THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!” Trump wrote. . . .
Investigators have reportedly focused on potential obstruction and Espionage Act charges in the probe.
“The Marxists and Fascists in the DOJ & FBI are going after me at a level and speed never seen before in our Country, and I did nothing wrong,” Trump posted on Tuesday morning. “Joe Biden kept (keeps) thousand of documents, in many locations, some illegally taken from skiffs while he was a Senator, a big portion of which were classified. He didn’t want to give them back, and still doesn’t. Nothing happens to him, with same reasonable prosecutor who correctly exonerated Mike Pence. I have a much different prosecutor, a Trump hater!”
Trump in a subsequent post . . . “They don’t want to run against me. I ran twice, I did much better the second time, getting millions and millions more votes than the first, a record for a sitting President, and am leading Biden in the polls, by a lot. They are the Party of Disinformation! They are using the DOJ & FBI against me to Rigg the 2024 Election. They’ll hit Hunter with something small to make their strike on me look ‘fair.’ Nothing about these Fascists is fair or honest. FIGHT!”
Areeba Shah, Salon, June 6, 2023
“Special counsel Jack Smith’s decision to meet with former President Trump’s lawyers suggests that Smith is near a final decision about whether to charge the former president for his handling of classified documents and possible obstruction of the DOJ's investigation into his conduct,” Temidayo Aganga-Williams, partner at Selendy Gay Elsberg and former senior investigative counsel for the House Jan. 6 committee, told Salon. . . .
After Monday’s meeting concluded, Trump posted on his [Troth Senchal] platform in capital letters: “How can DOJ possibly charge me, who did nothing wrong, when no other president’s were charged…” [WRG Note: Moronic misuse of apostrophe in original, of course] . . .
Unlike the investigations into Biden and Clinton, the Trump inquiry has focused on potential obstruction of the investigation and efforts to retrieve classified documents. . . .
“Trump’s attorneys are just working the referees, hoping to avoid a thorny legal mess for the former president,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told Salon. . . .
Most recently, the special counsel’s team obtained a recording in which Trump admitted to holding onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran.
The recording as well as surveillance video showing boxes of documents being moved at Mar-a-Lago by Trump's aides can serve as crucial pieces of evidence . . .
The Iran Document recording was headline news because it allows prosecutors to use Trump’s own voice to utterly destroy every one of his possible defenses regarding the stealing and hoarding (and lying about) the approximately 60 boxes of stolen documents.
Barbara McQuade, former U.S. Attorney and University of Michigan law professor:
This recording is significant because it demonstrates Trump’s knowledge of the law governing classified information. For most crimes, ignorance of the laws is no excuse. Handling classified information is an exception to that rule. Prosecutors must prove the defendant knew his conduct was illegal. A recording of Trump discussing his knowledge of that law would be powerful evidence of this element of the offense. . . . The recording is also valuable because it pertains to national defense information. For that reason, it is covered not only by statutes regulating classified information, but also under the Espionage Act. If he retained and discussed a document covered by the Espionage Act, then his claims that he declassified the documents become irrelevant. It would still be a crime.
Temidayo Aganga-Williams, partner at Selendy Gay Elsberg and former senior investigative counsel for the House January 6 Committee:
[T]his recording squarely moves the investigation of President Trump’s handling of classified documents from potentially just an obstruction case to squarely an Espionage Act case. The Espionage Act makes it a crime to, without authorization, retain documents related to national defense that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary or share such information about the same to an unauthorized person. . . . This recording, coupled with other recent revelations, makes it not only reasonable but extremely likely that former President Trump will be charged under the Espionage Act.
Kevin O'Brien, former federal prosecutor:
Trump’s taped conversation, as reported, fatally undermines one of his earliest defenses, that he could declassify national security documents at will. No credible person has believed Trump’s defense. If reports of the taped conversation are accurate, Trump himself didn’t believe it either. . . . Trump supposedly claims on the tape that the disclosed document contradicts General Milley’s assertion that he talked Trump out of invading Iran. If true, then the document must have contained extremely sensitive material on the military’s possible plans to in fact invade Iran. Few subjects would have been more sensitive than this — and any breach of secrecy regarding it would have threatened national security. This possibility only heightens the seriousness of what Trump appears to have done.
Ultimately, Trump’s undoing will be his stunning inability to keep his fucking mouth shut. Also, the only reason this recording exists is because of Trump’s (totally normal) paranoia about being misquoted when talking to an author or journalist. Trump makes sure that one of his aides records every conversation. So not only is Trump nuking the entirety of his defense, it’s Trump’s own personal recording!
Neal Katyal said it best: “Trump is too dumb to play dumb.”
Igor Derysh, Salon, June 6, 2023
Prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump have raised questions about an incident in October when a Mar-a-Lago employee drained the resort’s pool and flooded a room containing computer servers with surveillance video logs, according to CNN. . . .
[P]rosecutors have found the series of events “suspicious” and asked at least one witness about it. . . .
Prosecutors have heard testimony that the IT equipment in the room was not damaged by the flood, according to CNN, but investigators are looking at whether Trump or a small group of people who work for him tried to obstruct the Justice Department’s probe. . . .
Prosecutors have focused their obstruction inquiries on Trump body man Walt Nauta and a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents before federal agents searched the property last year . . . [T]he maintenance worker is the same person who drained the pool that led to the flooding. . . .
“Prosecutors don’t believe in coincidences. It’s not surprising that they are very suspicious about the flooding of a room where Mar-a-Lago surveillance video logs were kept,” [former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti] tweeted. “A jury would likely be skeptical of this evidence as well.” . . .
“Next up: my dog ate the docs?” quipped former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team. . . .
Smith’s investigators have been looking at potential obstruction as well as possible violations of the Espionage Act.
“Of all the things that this man has done, eight decades of lying and cheating and stealing, this case, this documents case is probably the easiest, shortest, simplest and yet carries the most severe penalties, likely penalties, of any of the cases, any of the legal issues that he's ever faced,” conservative attorney George Conway, a frequent Trump critic, told MSNBC.
“But for this man who is basically a nihilistic moron, for him to go to jail potentially for a long time, these Espionage Act charges bring very heavy sentences to potentially go to jail for something so pointless and silly and useless as keeping these documents is actually kind of fitting.”
Trump’s use of the old “important-evidence-against-me-got-flooded-by-accident-and-destroyed” trick dates back at least 35 years.
In 1988, there was “stonewalling, disorganization and obfuscation at every turn” as Trump tried to derail an investigation into his owing more than $3 million in unpaid rent to the city. And some key evidence was allegedly damaged when a room flooded — and then the evidence was destroyed. Imagine that.
Mark Alesia, Raw Story, June 6, 2023
It happened when auditors in New York City spent two years probing more than $3 million in unpaid rent the city was expecting from Trump’s Grand Hyatt hotel from operations in 1986.
That flood was noted in passing as part of a 2016 report by CBS News in the context of then-candidate Trump refusing to release his tax returns, purportedly because he was being audited. It said the two-year audit of Trump’s hotel from the late 1980s involved “stonewalling, disorganization and obfuscation at every turn.” . . .
In the Grand Hyatt case, city auditors filed a 73-page report, posted by CBS News. It said that Trump’s lease obligations should have required substantial documentation — “documentation (that) the Hotel — for one reason or another — could not or did not provide. In September, 1988, the Hotel informed us that it could not locate seven of the twelve monthly general ledgers, because they ‘were discarded after they were severely damaged by water when the room in which they were stored was flooded,’” the report said. . . .
The Trump hotel’s “resistance to our review and the Hotel's lapses in record keeping had substantial impact upon our inquiry's scope and methodology,” the report said.
Jeff Tiedrich, an activist and social media dude who writes an extremely profane Substack (“everyone is entitled to my own opinion”), points out that (as noted above) things are not looking so good for
the once-indicted twice-impeached popular-vote-losing insurrection-leading serial-sexual-predating casino-bankrupting hush-money-paying real-estate-scamming classified-war-plan-thieving weather-map-defacing tax-cheating charity-defrauding money-laundering fluorescent tangerine fuckface holed up in his shitty vermin-infested Florida golf motel.
Tiedrich revels in the rich schadenfreude from watching the myriad failures, face plants, and fuck-ups of the far-right. (His posts are also at Notes.)
June 3
pro tip: if you’re throwing a stupid shit-fit because a chicken sandwich company thinks all people should be treated fairly, grow the fuck up. maybe it’s time to ask yourself how your life has gone so far off the fucking rails
June 5
holy fucking shit, so now we’re supposed to believe that some golf motel flunky “accidentally” flooded the room where the security tapes are stored? nice try, but we’re not fucking idiots over here. Jack Smith is going to have so much fun taking you down. tick fucking tock, Donny
June 6
how sad it is that Donald Trump is melting the fuck down on his crappy app because the walls are closing in and his dime-store lawyers can’t stop what’s coming and he’s fucked and he knows it. wait, if it’s sad why am I laughing. oh, because it’s not sad, it’s fucking hilarious
Tiedrich also put together a weekly thing called “this week in stupid”, which easily could be ten times longer than its usual length.