Jun.07

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

More Legal Trouble for Trump

It's another one of those days, where Donald Trump's legal problems were all over the news (well, except for the right-wing "news" outlets). Let's run down the latest:

• The Iran Document: In the now infamous recording that was released last week, Trump speaks candidly of a plan for invading Iran that was in his possession post-presidency and that he never declassified. CNN is now reporting that no such document has been found among the materials recovered from Mar-a-Lago. At a glance, this seems to be very problematic for Trump, since it suggests that some documents, maybe many, are missing from the cache. Are they missing due to carelessness? Or due to having been passed on to people who should not have them? Any possibility would seem to deepen Trump's exposure.
  
  However, legal experts agree that the missing document isn't all that relevant to the case, unless it is eventually discovered at Mar-a-Lago (or is found to be in the wrong hands). It's entirely possible that Trump made it up. It's even more possible that he misremembered, and that he was offering a clumsy description of a document based on his less-than-perfect memory. And indeed, there is a document in the cache that talks about Iran, it's just not an invasion plan. Anyhow, point is, for the prosecution to use evidence against Trump, it has to have that evidence. And right now, it doesn't.
  
  What special counsel Jack Smith does have, by all accounts, is the tape of Trump talking about the document. And legal experts are also in agreement that the tape is a very, very big problem for the former president. As we have already noted a couple of times, his best remaining defense was that he did not knowingly hold onto classified information because he believed the documents in his possession had been declassified, since he had done the declassifying. As The Bulwark's Philip Rotner explains, that argument was going to be a tough sell, since a haphazard "I declassified by thinking about it/waving my hand/saying "Beetlejuice" three times/sprinkling the documents with pixie dust/paying tribute to Cthulhu" process is not legitimate. But with the tape, it's clear as can be that Trump knew he hadn't declassified the documents and that he wasn't entitled to have or share them.
  
  
• Pool Games: Last October, one of the pools at Mar-a-Lago was drained, and the water ended up in a room that held a bunch of computer servers. Those servers were primarily responsible for storing video footage from the facility's security cameras. It's not clear that any data was lost, but the feds are taking a close look, since deliberate destruction of video footage could be part of an obstruction of justice charge.
  
  
• Washington Meeting: On Monday, three of Trump's lawyers—John Rowley, James Trusty and Lindsey Halligan—were in Washington to meet with Smith. The meeting apparently lasted a couple of hours, and nobody involved said a word after. All that can be said at the moment is that these are the kind of meetings that tend to happen near the end of the investigative process.
  
  
• Trump Gone Wild: Before the Washington meeting, and especially after, Trump went wild on his boutique social media platform, and made numerous references to how unfair it is that he's going to be indicted. Given the proximity of those tweets to the Washington confab, not to mention that Jack Smith's grand jury is about to reconvene, it is quite reasonable to connect the dots and to conclude that the former president is about to be indicted for the Mar-a-Lago documents.

That's the latest, at least for now. It's hard to believe we'll make it through the week without more news on the Trump legal front, since he's got so very many messes he's dealing with.

Incidentally, it turns out it's hard to make the emojis idea work on an ongoing basis, especially since some days will have both good and bad news for Trump. So, we're going to let it go. (Z)