Additional Indictments In Trump Classified Docs Case
Photo by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0
The Rule of Tod is about to get some case law backing. Three new charges against The Donald himself and a third person, Carlos De Oliveira, have come down from federal prosecutors in the Trump classified docs case.
Prosecutors announced additional charges against Donald Trump on Thursday in his alleged hoarding and hiding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, accusing the former president and a newly indicted aide of trying to keep security camera footage from being reviewed by investigators and bringing the number of total federal charges against Trump to 40.
Trump already faced 31 counts of illegally retaining national defense information, but federal prosecutors led by special counsel Jack Smith have added a 32nd to the list. That count centers on a now-infamous conversation Trump allegedly had at his golf club and summer residence in Bedminster, N.J., in July 2021, focused on what has been described by others as a secret military document concerning Iran.
In that conversation, which was recorded, Trump said: “As president I could have declassified it. … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still secret.”
The new indictment also levels accusations of a broader effort by Trump and some of those around him to cover their tracks as the FBI sought to retrieve highly classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home and private club, long after his presidency ended. The indictment charges that Trump and two aides, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, requested that another Trump employee “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”
While Trump has publicly claimed he was happy to hand over the footage in response to a grand jury subpoena, others close to him have said he was upset about it, and the indictment suggests a scramble among his aides soon after they received the demand for the footage. Prosecutors say that Nauta, Trump’s longtime valet, changed plans to travel with Trump to Illinois around the time the subpoena was sent, instead traveling to Florida to talk to other Trump employees about the camera footage. He appeared to try to keep the reason for the trip to Mar-a-Lago under wraps, the indictment says, telling others he was going there for different reasons.
Nauta was initially indicted alongside the former president in the documents case in June, accused of helping him mislead investigators as they sought to retrieve all of the classified material in Trump’s possession.
Both Trump and Nauta have pleaded not guilty to the charges in that initial indictment. The federal judge overseeing the case in Fort Pierce, Fla., has set the trial to begin in May, though it is not uncommon for such schedules to be delayed to deal with pretrial disputes and issues.
This superseding indictment is not to be confused with the other Jack Smith-led investigation into the events surrounding January 6th that Trump announced earlier in the week he was told he would be facing more charges from. Also not to be confused with the possibility of a Fulton County, GA, grand jury possibly handing down more indictments involving election inference there.
We really do need a unified flow chart for all this. And there probably is more coming.
Imagine how future historians will boggle at the complexity of misdeeds committed by Trump & Co.Report
Watergate was like that too. The break-in was just a gateway to a maze of plumbers, CreePs, dirty tricks, conspiracies, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance. And the same insistence in the teeth of all the evidence that the president had done nothing wrong.Report
I’ve mentioned before about how our popular images of living in a 2nd or 3rd World or repressive regime are all wrong.
Like that everyone is miserable and aware that things are Not Right.
But the actual experience for most people living in places like Latin America, the Arab states, or Africa is that everything is perfectly normal.
They hear that the President’s brother has acquired the national airline, or that the some dissident has been disappeared, and they shrug in indifference because that what everyone tells each other, that corruption and bribery and brutality is just one of those things y’know, how the world works and anyway who cares because the soccer team is advancing to the finals.
This is what I see happening in America now, where a level of corruption and criminality that caused a previous generation of Senators to turn against their own party’s President barely even breaks through the days celebrity gossip.
No one is even bothering to protest Trump’s innocence any more. The vast majority of the party just shrugs in indifference at his crime, because they want him to be their retribution.Report
Senators disliking a politician and thinking he’d make a bad President is why Ted Cruz’s campaign failed.
The problem with Trump is he’s got a cult following. Subtract that and he ends up in prison real easy, or at least not in the WH.Report
What we know from studying smaller miserable repressive regimes is that the lack of democracy is within the populace not any one individual.
They can have an endless string of strongmen, caudillos, presidents-for-life and nothing ever changes.
Trump, DeSantis, Abbot, whatever, the party base wants a strongman who will be their retribution.
Until the Trumpists are reduced to an ineffectual fringe, American democracy will be in mortal danger.Report
The last serious contender for being a cult of personality leader was Obama. He appealed to a somewhat different group and didn’t have the desire to be a dictator, but the invulnerability to rational evaluations was there.
The desire to have your own guy in there at any cost, even to the extent of ignoring his faults and throwing away democracy, is part of the human condition.
With Team Blue we see that desire expressed whenever they talk about court packing or how every member of the GOP is a Na.zi and ergo can’t be trusted in office. Modern media and/or social media is making it worse.
But “part of the human condition” means we need to worry about this entire issue in general as well as Trump specifically.Report
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFdAJRVm94
This one is my favorite. Jib jab is a parody creator and they make fun of politicians professionally.
Comparing Obama to Superman was making fun of him because he’s real (and thus can actually lower the ocean) while Superman is merely fictional.
When they did this Obama’s resume was extremely thin. No leadership experience, no academic papers published, no laws created.Report
Remember when he got the Peace Prize?
I had a hardcore (D) buddy at work and I ran up to him and asked him “Did you hear that Obama won the Peace Prize?”
He sighed heavily and said “Okay, what’s the punchline?”
I laughed and told him to go to CNN.com.Report
Nominations for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize closed just 11 days after Obama took office.
“We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year…”
In a USA Today / Gallup Poll conducted October 16–19, 61% of American adults polled responded that they thought Obama did not deserve to win the prize, while 34% responded that he did;Report
Yes BUT OMG. Yeah O had a lot of rabid fans. But as you say he didnt’ want to be a dictator. So he retired and plays golf. Doesn’t do much politically. The “cult” sprang up around hiim and he went to play golf. Meanwhile Donny T’s Cult is buying branded coozie cups to pay his legal bills because they got a hard on from some McNaughton painting of Jesus shaking hands with tfg.Report
Yes. Trump with this kind of following is way worse than Obama. However the current process of selecting a President seriously opens the door for this kind of thing.
The parties are weak and can get rolled by the social media wave of a charismatic populist. A sane vetting process wouldn’t have allowed either of them to be in charge.
And having seen this twice in the last three Presidents, I’d say we have a problem.
Now that’s just the election. Trump also proved that our methods for removing a President who really shouldn’t be there are weak.Report
It is very bemusing to see you adopting the world weary pose that both “parties are weak and can get rolled by the social media wave of a charismatic populist.” In the shadow of the unambiguous fact that in 2016 AND in 2020 one of the two parties rules, structures, elite Politicians and base voters firmly crushed the campaigns of charismatic populists in favor of more centrist and transactional “normal” politicians. Especially when you do so by pointing at Barack Fishin’ Obama who is, easily, the most staid and conservative President the country has had since, what, Bush I?Report
Ted Cruz objectively cannot accomplish anything. He’s not actually done anything at all for the people he claims to represent, ever.
Now, you can argue that that is because he is disliked, that people won’t work with him, but there’s no reason that he would stop being disliked if president. In fact, the _reason_ he is disliked by members of his own party is that he is actually very bad at politics, while somehow being good at being elected.Report
Jan 6th was a problem worth removing him over.
You try to overthrow the government just once and people never forgive you.
If we had done so, even if it had only left Pence in charge for a few days, we’d be in a different place. Pence would have set a record for short time in office and Trump would be unable to run for any gov office.Report
This is a pleasant fiction, isn’t it?Report
And yet here we are . . . .Report
As I keep pointing out: The idea you can’t impeach and convict a president after he leaves office is nonsense, because part of the point of conviction is to have the option for barring them from future office!
Mitch McConnell is just a liar and should have been called out by everyone for claiming that. For asserting that Trump was guilty of what he was impeached of, but nevertheless McConnell pretended that he couldn’t be impeached due to being out of office…and also the fact that the Senate didn’t take up the trial until after he was out of office because McConnell didn’t bother to bring the Senate back.
And as a result of that, we’re going to have a bunch of idiots arguing that Trump shouldn’t be on trial while he’s running for reelection. Because apparently every possible way of holding him liable for _attempting to overthrow the government with violence_ is not workable, somehow, and we have to put him back in office.
The one saving grace is that he’s sorta stupid and venal, and thus _didn’t_ pardon everyone involved in that. Because I want everyone to imagine a world where he did, and realize there’s an actual problem there in how our constitution is set up…even if the courts say he can’t pardon himself, which is unclear, that leads to insane conclusions like the president can hire people to assassinate their own prosecutor and then pardon them. And without that sort of stuff, prosecuting him without the ability to cut deals with any of those people would be impossible. (At least, for anyone but Trump, who continued to commit crimes after leaving office.)
There’s very serious problems with letting people like this this close to the presidency, especially when apparently half the population are fine with it. If we don’t have the political will to impeach presidents who commit very obvious crimes, than we cannot, under any circumstances, allow the president to have the powers that they have.Report
Honestly, and I suspect a lot of people are going to reject this out of hand, but is is still true…having a separate executive and legislative is a somewhat stupid setup. We got that basically by an accident of history, not some carefully reasoned-out logic.
A parliamentary setup works better in almost every conceivable way. Even in very non-obvious ways, it works better, like the shadow cabinet concept, where the party out of power has an entire functioning cabinet structure that speaks for them in their area of expertise and is ready to step in when they get the majority.
Now, in practice, some parliamentary systems have bad features, I’m sure, but they are optional, changeable, whereas having a separate executive and legislature is basically fundamentally flawed in ways that cannot be fixed.Report
What makes you say they work better?
Far as I can tell, they’re mostly less stable and far more prone to populism.Report
For one thing, you don’t have the inherent conflict of the party that is not in the presidency but in a majority in the legislative, where they basically want things to go wrong and the president to fail so their guy gets in.
Aka, the Republicans announcing what they are trying to do is ‘Making Barrack Obama a one-term president’, instead of ‘Oh, we’re in charge and everyone knows that, maybe we should actually be helpful’.
A lot of the problems at the national level are the parties pretending each other are problem, and that gets seriously more difficult if one of them is very clearly in charge.
No, they just look less stable because the UK has a stupidly dramatic way to change who is in charge, where they dissolve everything and try to rebuild it, instead of just, you know, having a vote.
But that’s not inherently part of a parliamentary system, there’s nothing stopping the exact same voting system we currently have, even having the exact same system of House and Senate (Although we should probably reduce the power of the Senate to basically veto power, like the House of Lords), although I would like to see at least _some_ provision for recalling elected members.
What is slightly more unstable is composition of the sides, but that’s actually a good thing, because it’s how you get more than two parties, and ones that haven’t staked out opposite ends of literally every position. You instead get coalitions and then members of the coalition can demand things in exchange for joining, which actually tend to position things more in the center consensus area.
And I don’t know what you mean by populism…a country that directly elects a president is _way_ more prone to populism than a country that each area elects local individuals and those individuals then choose who is in charge. And even if a populist is elected…no one in parliament needs to actually select them to lead.Report