This is huge if true. Apparently, the government shipped pallets of marked classified documents to Mar a Lago, then raided the place, “found” them, charged Trump, and covered up what they did. If the judge hadn’t ordered documents to be unredacted, we’d never have known. She seems like a hero of the Republic to me.
Yup
Don’t tell me.
They also shipped the Ark of the Convenant, which was placed in a warehouse by the GSA at the end of the movie Indiana Jones, to Mar a Lago?
Top. Men.
Unfortunately upon unredaction it was revealed that the Ark had slipped off its pallet and was lost in transit. Fortunately all of the Reagan Commandments have been retrieved but reportedly one: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”.
Speaking of Top Men. Robert Gouveia Esq. goes through the newly un-redacted subpoena. He’s obviously taking it from a pro-Trump viewpoint but nonetheless walks through all the newly revealed statements line by line. Judge for yourself.
What a story. The FBI planted spies a Mar-a-Lago to do such things as measure the Donald and Melania’s rooms while they were gone, etc. None of this we’d know about except for Judge Cannon.
Apparently, the government shipped pallets of marked classified documents to Mar a Lago, then raided the place, “found” them, charged Trump, and covered up what they did.
A glance at a timeline of these actions makes this scenario dubious. Trump received these documents in July 2021. That same month Trump showed a document that he claimed was classified to people who had no clearance to view such documents and did it again some point in August or September. From the indictment:
and
Then Trump returned a number of boxes of material in January, 2022. So this alleged framing attempt sat on its butt for six months and allowed Trump opportunity to completely return the planted evidence? The actual raid on Mar-a-Lago happened on May 12, 2022. So Trump had almost a year to dodge this by voluntarily turning in said classified and potentially classified material.
Neither link source above is considered trustworthy here, but these claims can easily be verified in court and I doubt the FBI would risk endangering their case by making any of the above up. And it looks to me like Trump had considerable warning and opportunity to have someone look through this stuff for classified material.
There’s something wrong with the narrative.
A lot of recent defense of Trump seems like a spaghetti defense. Throw a bunch of narratives on a wall and see what sticks.
Perhaps, but why the redactions?
Perhaps, but why the redactions?
Those redactions are pretty funny business along with the tenuous nature of most of the cases being brought against Trump. But there’s not much point to bringing up something else that falls apart if one thinks about it for a few minutes. There’s quite a bit of that going on on both sides of this debate.
For example, in this story, why give your target ten months to sabotage your frame job? My take is that stuff was already in there from the beginning. I don’t know if it were deliberately put in by someone who wanted those documents or just caught in the flow by accident. But looks like Trump had plenty of time to fix the issues even if he was originally unaware – which might be true despite the above alleged showboating with alleged secret documents. (Nobody can confirm now whether he was waving around secret battle plans for the UK or some random non-classified paper on his desk.) It didn’t need to go this far.
At least, he could have put it in a more secure location while his people went through it. Then it would be a matter of detailing to the court how he fully complied with law rather than another legal mess. There’s a lot of self-inflicted damage here.
Going back to my original argument, consider this: how could enemies of the US do better than to spread noise like this? I think these sorts of low value arguments are mostly emergent phenomena. But if I were just wanting to mess up the political scene on a limited budget, then a great start would be elevating the visibility of plausible, emotion-jerking, but poor arguments on all sides of the political conflict. So we’d have endless flame wars about what Trump supposedly said on Twitter or when the FBI had time to plant evidence rather than the actual merits of these cases. It’s a bar fight with a lot of ineffective improvised weapons about. At least check that you’re holding a chair instead of a pillow when you try to clobber the other guy, right?
Here, I think there’s a strong case that nobody would be bothering with any of the criminal court cases (and some of the civil ones), if Trump weren’t running for the 2024 election. There’s a lot of novel/creative (mis)interpretation of law, prosecutor attempts to hide evidence (such as the above redacting), and selective prosecution.
OTOH, Trump enabled a significant portion of these cases. There wouldn’t be a Stormy Daniels payoff or subsequent criminal trial, if he could control himself and/or come up with a more legally sensible way to pay her off. There wouldn’t be a classified documents case, if he had taken that seriously back in January 2022. And the Georgia case wouldn’t exist at all without his selfish and public wheedling about those votes he supposedly should have gotten. Last I checked, he has lost at least one significant civil lawsuit (alleged defamation and sexual assault against an E. Jean Carroll). There’s a lot of own goal on the Trump side.
My take is that Trump wouldn’t have a chance against a real candidate. Fortunately for him, the Democrats (or rather the people who control the DNC) chose Biden and third parties garner votes in trace amounts. Biden’s only real hope is that Trump either becomes too ill to continue to campaign or one of these court cases stick – more spaghetti on the wall. I don’t think either will happen.
But you don’t think it a little odd that all these facts were redacted and had to be unredacted by a Federal judge in FLA? Otherwise we’d have never known about this?
Also as I understand it Trump’s team was in negotiations with the archives for returning the documents AFTER securing them in a fashion I believe I read was FBI approved. But that didn’t deter the Biden DoJ.
Now I agree Trump after office shouldn’t have been showing classified documents to those w/o clearance. If he gets convicted, then elected, he can pardon himself for that. And if the Democrats get control of the US House again in 2024 they can impeach him for that and he’ll be acquitted in the Senate.
Meanwhile Joe Biden pilfered classified documents as a Senator and won’t be prosecuted because he now fits the legal definition of an imbecile.
In any case, Biden couldn’t get indicted until after he leave office. If the DOJ got an indictment, he could order it dismissed with prejudice.
Agreed, at least not while Biden is in office.
But what Robert Hur has done is given him a “Get out of Jail, Free” card after Biden leaves office.
Pardon for me, prison for thee.
This tree that had to be planted several times may finally be taking root:
“Justice Thomas raised crucial question about legitimacy of special counsel’s prosecution of Trump
Jack Smith was a private citizen when AG Garland appointed him as special counsel to investigate Trump in 2022”
“Did you, in this litigation, challenge the appointment of special counsel?” Thomas asked Trump attorney John Sauer on Thursday during a nearly three-hour session at the Supreme Court”
“It points to a very important issue here because one of [the special counsel’s] arguments is, of course, that we should have this presumption of regularity. That runs into the reality that we have here an extraordinary prosecutorial power being exercised by someone who was never nominated by the president or confirmed by the Senate at any time. So we agree with that position. We hadn’t raised it yet in this case when this case went up on appeal,” Sauer said.”
“The crux of the problem, according to Meese, is that Smith was never confirmed by the Senate as a U.S. attorney, and no other statute allows the U.S. attorney general to name merely anyone as special counsel. Smith was acting U.S. attorney for a federal district in Tennessee in 2017, but he was never nominated to the position. He resigned from the private sector after then-President Trump nominated a different prosecutor as U.S. attorney for the middle district of Tennessee.”
And the Florida case:
“The Florida court has yet to rule on Trump’s motion to dismiss the classified documents case due to claims that Smith was improperly appointed.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/justice-thomas-raised-crucial-question-about-legitimacy-special-counsels-prosecution-trump
He (Smith) has no freaking business being in the position he is in. Instead of a properly appointed special counsel nominated by the POTUS and approved by the Senate they put in place a known partisan hack notorious for losing on appeal, but who they knew would do whatever it took to get a conviction. Who cares if its thrown out on appeal? It would achieve its objective.
Even if SCOTUS ultimately dodges removing Smith from the case under those grounds, statements made by Thomas/Roberts etc. could be used by Cannon to throw out Jack Smith; someone with whom she obviously isn’t to happy with. It would be harder for an appeals court to overrule her if SCOTUS signals their support to said idea that he was improperly appointed by the AG even if they don’t remove/dismiss him (and/or the case) themselves.
…and the wheels of justice spin on…
These guys must be a little too used to people who fall on their sword after about two acts of the play. This is starting to look like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
Then there are all the meetings between the Biden admin, GSA, and state and local prosecutors coordinating the stalinist show trials.
I find the timeline more than a little suspicious.
There’s an odd sequence whereby:
1: Trump team grabs docs from WH for transfer to Mar-a-largo. OK so what? Pence did the same. I presume every president since Washington has.
2: GSA dumps pallets of boxes of documents (some classified? IDK) onto Mar-a-Largo. Apparently FBI is made aware this has happened?
3: Archives demand return of classified documents.
4: Trump team starts to work with archives for documents return.
5: Somehow FBI gets involved over storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Largo. Trump team improves locks for storage of classified documents. FBI gives approval.
6: DoJ gets involved, Archives now get huffy about document returns.
7: Trump team keeps trying to work with Archives.
8: Merritt Garland appoints Jack Smith as special prosecutor to look into “mishandling of classified documents” thus beginning the criminalizing of what had been an administrative kerfuffle.
9: Sometime after this, the DOE revokes Trump’s Q clearance now making his possession of classified documents ex-post-facto illegal.
10: Indictments to be handed down?
I’m very curious about Step 9. The ordering of events around that and who was in communication with whom when that decision was made? In the meantime: the likes of Brennan, Clapper and Hayden all retain theirs? (AFAIK, the intelligence blob continues)…
We may need a constitutional amendment around protecting a former president from procedural prosecutions without some form of pro-forma due process or this kind of banana-republic abuse will continue.
One thing is for sure certain. Should Trump get re-elected you can be damn sure NONE of his appointees will be talking to any personnel from the DoJ, FBI or any three letter agency likely either with or without legal counsel for the president-elect present prior to his inauguration. No more perjury traps, no more “…sending some guys over”, no more “higher loyalties”.
Oh and I left out Step 9a: FBI seizes documents in raid on Mar-a-Largo so that they could seize the boxes of documents they helped to deliver?
I’m sure the events are all unrelated and the timeline was just happenstance.
What if things are just exactly as they appear? -Scott Adams
One thing is for sure certain. Should Trump get re-elected you can be damn sure NONE of his appointees will be talking to any personnel from the DoJ, FBI or any three letter agency likely either with or without legal counsel for the president-elect present prior to his inauguration. No more perjury traps, no more “…sending some guys over”, no more “higher loyalties”.
Definitely agree with this one. Trust is gone.