Monday, June 19, 2023

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump's biggest tactical flaw is that he can't shut up, something that's going to get him prison time one of these days.


A WEEK AFTER his second post-presidential arrest, this one for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House, Donald Trump turned to Fox News host Bret Baier on Monday to make the case for why he should lead the country again. But he ended up essentially confessing to the crime of which he’s accused: stealing and sharing top-secret government information.

Before that, however, Baier pressed Trump to explain why he kept the boxes of classified materials at Mar-a-Lago and refused to comply with government requests to return them, as described in his new felony indictment. In between dismissing the case as “the document hoax” or accusing other presidents of illegally hoarding their own sensitive documents, Trump offered the bizarre explanation that he couldn’t give up the boxes to authorities because they also contained… his clothes.

“Like every other president I take things out,” Trump said. “In my case, I took it out pretty much in a hurry. People packed it up and left. I had clothing in there, I had all sorts of personal items in there. Much, much stuff.” After a brief digression to call his former attorney general Bill Barr a “coward,” Trump reiterated, “I have got a lot of things in there. I will go through those boxes. I have to go through those boxes. I take out personal things.” Finally, he clarified what those items were: “These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things: golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes, there were many things,” he said.

While not wanting Dark Brandon to seize your golf shirts may prove a compelling argument in court, another of Trump’s evasions seems less likely to hold water. Baier also brought up one of the most damning parts of the federal indictment, a recording from July 2021 in which Trump is heard showing off a document detailing an attack plan against Iran, revealing that it’s still officially secret and he no longer has the power to declassify it. Trump blustered for a moment about what he actually said, then pivoted to the claim that he wasn’t even holding a particular document — despite corroborating testimony from others in the room when it happened. No wonder this guy’s lawyers keep quitting on him.

And this time, Trump refusing to shut up about the classified documents he had in his possession may end up putting him in a box early

A magistrate judge has signed off on special counsel Jack Smith’s request that former President Donald Trump and his co-defendant Walt Nauta be prohibited from disclosing information the discovery handed over to the defense in the criminal case Trump and Nauta now face from the special counsel.

Among the restrictions approved by US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who previously approved the search warrant the FBI executed at Mar-a-Lago last year, is that “The Discovery Materials, along with any information derived therefrom, shall not be disclosed to the public or the news media, or disseminated on any news or social media platform, without prior notice to and consent of the United States or approval of the Court.”

The order sought by prosecutors and approved by Reinhart was expected and used standard language. However, it comes in a first-of-its-kind federal criminal case against an ex-president who has a proclivity to express opinions on social media and who is being prosecuted, in part, because of his alleged mishandling of sensitive government information.

The order follows the language that Smith proposed and it governs the unclassified discovery the defense will receive. The defendants did not oppose Smith’s request.

The classified materials federal investigators have collected, which are at the heart of Smith’s case, will be subjected to their own procedures for the case. The two Trump attorneys who have made appearances in the case confirmed Friday to US District Judge Aileen Cannon, who will preside over the case, that they have been in contact with the Justice Department about expediting their security clearances.

Somehow, I don't think this will be the last public interview Trump gives about these very documents. 

Just keep watching.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Apparently, Attorney General Merrick Garland fielded calls from his own to slow-walk Trump on January 6th for more than a year after taking office, with Chris Wray and the FBI openly refusing to go directly after Trump.

Hours after he was sworn in as attorney general, Merrick Garland and his deputies gathered in a wood-paneled conference room in the Justice Department for a private briefing on the investigation he had promised to make his highest priority: bringing to justice those responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021

In the two months since the siege, federal agents had conducted 709 searches, charged 278 rioters and identified 885 likely suspects, said Michael R. Sherwin, then-acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, ticking through a slide presentation. Garland and some of his deputies nodded approvingly at the stats, and the new attorney general called the progress “remarkable,” according to people in the room.

Sherwin’s office, with the help of the FBI, was responsible for prosecuting all crimes stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. He had made headlines the day after by refusing to rule out the possibility that President Donald Trump himself could be culpable. “We are looking at all actors, not only the people who went into the building,” Sherwin said in response to a reporter’s question about Trump. “If the evidence fits the elements of a crime, they’re going to be charged.”

But according to a copy of the briefing document, absent from Sherwin’s 11-page presentation to Garland on March 11, 2021, was any reference to Trump or his advisers — those who did not go to the Capitol riot but orchestrated events that led to it.

A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.

A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.

In November, after Trump announced he was again running for president, making him a potential 2024 rival to President Biden, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

On June 8, in a separate investigation that was also turned over to the special counsel, Smith secured a grand jury indictment against the former president for mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Trump was charged with 31 counts of violating a part of the Espionage Act, as well as six counts arising from alleged efforts to mislead federal investigators.

The effort to investigate Trump over classified records has had its own obstacles, including FBI agents who resisted raiding the former president’s home. But the discovery of top-secret documents in Trump’s possession triggered an urgent national security investigation that laid out a well-defined legal path for prosecutors, compared with the unprecedented task of building a case against Trump for trying to steal the election.

Whether a decision about Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6 could have come any earlier is unclear. The delays in examining that question began before Garland was even confirmed. Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials and Paul Abbate, the top deputy to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature, according to five individuals familiar with the decision. Instead, they insisted on a methodical approach — focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder.

The strategy was embraced by Garland, Monaco and Wray. They remained committed to it even as evidence emerged of an organized, weeks-long effort by Trump and his advisers before Jan. 6 to pressure state leaders, Justice officials and Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory.

In the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump supporters boasted publicly that they had submitted fake electors on his behalf, but the Justice Department declined to investigate the matter in February 2021, The Post found. The department did not actively probe the effort for nearly a year, and the FBI did not open an investigation of the electors scheme until April 2022, about 15 months after the attack.

The Justice Department’s painstaking approach to investigating Trump can be traced to Garland’s desire to turn the page from missteps, bruising attacks and allegations of partisanship in the department’s recent investigations of both Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Inside Justice, however, some have complained that the attorney general’s determination to steer clear of any claims of political motive has chilled efforts to investigate the former president. “You couldn’t use the T word,” said one former Justice official briefed on prosecutors’ discussions.

This account is based on internal documents, court files, congressional records, handwritten contemporaneous notes, and interviews with more than two dozen current and former prosecutors, investigators, and others with knowledge of the probe. Most of the people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal decision-making related to the investigation.

Spokespeople at the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment or make Garland, Monaco or Wray available for interviews.
 
Garland had to be dragged kicking and screaming into investigating Trump because that's where all the evidence of the J6 small fry that they prosecuted led to. Trump forced Garland's hand. 

 
The WaPo has a story that many Merrick Garland attackers claim confirms their fears about the DOJ investigation. Except the story has really important gaps, most importantly in its portrayal of the fake electors investigation, which is the damning part of the story about Garland or Lisa Monaco’s direct decisions (as opposed to those of FBI).

Moreover, the one thing it proves definitively is that former FBI Washington Field Office head Steve D’Antuono repeatedly shot down investigative prongs of this investigation, just like he did the stolen documents investigation. That the head of the WFO was running interference for Trump raises key questions about FBI missteps with people like Brandon Straka, someone arrested early who had direct ties to the scheme in the Willard, to say nothing about WFO’s ineptitude in advance of the attack.

Here are the main disclosures.

The story describes that — after such time as Brandon Straka was being treated as a cooperative witness — JP Cooney pitched an idea to get to Stone through the Oath Keepers, not the Proud Boys.

But a group of prosecutors led by J.P. Cooney, the head of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. attorney’s office, argued that the existing structure of the probe overlooked a key investigative angle. They sought to open a new front, based partly on publicly available evidence, including from social media, that linked some extremists involved in the riot to people in Trump’s orbit — including Roger Stone, Trump’s longest-serving political adviser; Ali Alexander, an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot; and Alex Jones, the Infowars host.

[snip]

According to three people who either viewed or were briefed on Cooney’s plan, it called for a task force to embark on a wide-ranging effort, including seeking phone records for Stone as well as Alexander. Cooney wanted investigators to follow the money — to trace who had financed the false claims of a stolen election and paid for the travel of rallygoers-turned-rioters. He was urging investigators to probe the connection between Stone and members of the Oath Keepers, who were photographed together outside the Willard hotel in downtown Washington on the morning of Jan. 6.

[snip]

D’Antuono called Sherwin. The two agreed Cooney did not provide evidence that Stone had likely committed a crime — the standard they considered appropriate for looking at a political figure. Investigating Stone simply because he spent time with Oath Keepers could expose the department to accusations that it had politicized the probe, they told colleagues.

D’Antuono took the matter to Abbate, Wray’s newly named deputy director. Abbate agreed the plan was premature.

It’s genuinely hard to believe this was the plan. To be sure, FBI did investigate Stone’s ties to the Oath Keepers, starting no later than March 2021. But that wasn’t the obvious route to get to Trump.

The route to get there, importantly, was via a route that Bill Barr had affirmatively dismissed in advance of the attack: through the Proud Boys, not the Oath Keepers. Stone’s ties to the Oath Keepers was not obviously criminal; it still may not be. His ties to the Proud Boys are central.

In any case, Steve D’Antuono — who stalled the stolen documents case investigation last summer — shot down this angle of the investigation early on
 
So it wasn't Garland's direct call, but he was in charge of the mess that followed. Bill Barr and Chris Wray protected Trump, and stalled out Garland for months.
 
Still a lot of questions to be answered, including when Trump gets J6 charges.
 
If ever.

A Juneteenth Proclamation

In honor of the Juneteenth federal holiday today, the National Archives will add the Emancipation Proclamation to the Rotunda display for the American public to see.
 
The National Archives plans to place the Emancipation Proclamation on permanent public display in its Rotunda alongside the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the agency announced on Saturday.

“I am proud that the National Archives will enshrine this seminal document for public display adjacent to our nation’s founding documents. Together, they tell a more comprehensive story of the history of all Americans and document progress in our nation’s continuous growth toward a more perfect Union,” said Archivist Dr. Colleen Shogan in a statement.

The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, in which former President Abraham Lincoln wrote that “all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free,” will be up for the National Archives Museum’s annual temporary display to mark Juneteenth, from June 17 to 19.

But Shogan announced ahead of the temporary display that the Archives plans to put the double-sided, five-page document on permanent display in the Rotunda that houses other foundational documents.

The Archives says it’s assessing the best display environment to protect the document condition, and may rotate the original pages on display to preserve the material from light exposure. A timeline for the permanent display was not shared in the Saturday announcement.

In the three-day temporary display period for the Archives’ Juneteenth celebration, the Emancipation Proclamation is viewable along with General Order No. 3, an 1865 document that informed the people of Texas that all enslaved persons were free. The issuance of General Order No. 3 on June 19 of that year is now celebrated as the Juneteenth holiday.
 
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is definitely a "foundational document" of American history.  In an era where states like Texas and Florida are trying to eliminate as much Black history as they can, the National Archives reminding the country that Black history is very much American history is a statement in and of itself.

Will this foundational document even be taught in schools in red states years from now? Will Juneteenth and its history even be mentioned?
 
The fact that we even have to ask is astonishing.