Advertising
Former President Donald Trump
CNN also reported last week that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had handed over 16 documents to Smith’s investigators that showed Trump and his advisors had specific knowledge of the correct declassification process if Trump had wanted to make public previously secret materials. Trump has insisted that he had declassified all the documents he took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when he left office in January of 2021, a claim that has been proved false by Trump’s own statements and actions.
Trump claimed recently at the CNN so-called “town hall” in New Hampshire that the documents were declassified “automatically” when he took them from the White House because of the Presidential Records Act. The act has nothing to do with classification or declassification of documents, and rather than giving Trump permission to take documents from the White House, it sets forth the procedures for Trump or any other president must follow to turn over to the National Archives any and all records, gifts, or other materials that are in the White House at the end of a presidency.
Cobb told CNN that the NARA documents turned over to the Office of the Special Prosecutor would demolish any “legal hurdle” Trump might attempt to erect by claiming that he and his advisors didn’t know they couldn’t declassify documents with the wave of a wand, or as Trump previously claimed, “just by thinking about it.”
In other disappointing news for the former president, another of his lawyers, Evan Corcoran, turned over 50 pages of notes he took of conversations with Trump last year before the FBI searched for classified documents at Mar a Lago. According to The Guardian, Corcoran warned Trump that he could not legally retain any classified documents after Trump was subpoenaed for those documents by the Department of Justice in early May of last year. Corcoran was the lawyer who handled the putative “diligent search” for documents at Trump’s residence/club in Palm Beach, Florida after the subpoena was served.
According to the Guardian, “prosecutors have fixated on Trump’s valet Walt Nauta, after he told the Justice Department that Trump told him to move boxes out of the storage room before and after the subpoena.” A source who described the notes Corcoran turned over to prosecutor Smith told the Guardian that “the notes revealed how Trump and Nauta had unusually detailed knowledge of the botched subpoena response, including where Corcoran intended to search and not search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as when Corcoran was actually doing his search.”
Special Counsel Smith was able to obtain Corcoran’s notes when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the prosecutors could “pierce” the attorney-client privilege that existed between Trump and Corcoran because the lawyer's communications with Trump had been “in furtherance of a crime,” rather than normal attorney-client work product. Corcoran’s notes were seen by the grand jury sitting in Washington D.C. that is considering charges against Trump and others in the classified documents case.
In addition, Corcoran himself testified before the grand jury in March. According to the New York Times, Corcoran told the grand jury that he had been told that the storage room was the only place where documents taken from the White House were stored. Corcoran ended up spending several days going through more than 60 boxes of documents in the storage room as part of his “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. In June 2022, Corcoran drew up the affidavit given to the Department of Justice during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago that certified the “diligent search” had turned up only 31 classified documents, which were turned over at that time in response to the subpoena. Corcoran arranged for another Trump lawyer, Christina Bobb, to sign the affidavit he had drawn up. Bobb signed it only after a disclaimer had been added that she had not been involved in the search and had only been told that the search was “diligent.”
The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago two months later turned up more than 100 additional classified documents that were discovered in the storage room as well as in Trump’s personal office. In Corcoran’s testimony to the grand jury, he said while Trump had not misled him about where classified documents might be stored at Mar-a-Lago, the only place he suggested Corcoran should search was the storage room. Corcoran’s notes indicate that there were times during the several days he searched the storage room that the room may have been left unattended.
The Department of Justice previously subpoenaed tapes from security cameras at Mar-a-Lago that show Trump’s valet Nauta carrying boxes from the storage room. Some of the tapes had gaps, according to the Guardian, so to look into whether the tapes were doctored, the grand jury subpoenaed Matthew Calamari Sr, the Trump Organization’s security chief, and his son Matthew Jr., who succeeded him as director of corporate security for the Trump Organization. Both Calamaris have testified before the grand jury. It was also reported last week that the grand jury has heard testimony about the classified documents from a “cooperating witness” who worked at Mar-a-Lago. It is unknown who the cooperating witness is, or where he or she worked at Mar-a-Lago or what their job might have been.
In order to charge and convict Trump of obstruction of justice, prosecutors would need to prove that Trump ordered Nauta or others to move boxes containing classified documents after he had received the subpoena from the DOJ on May 11, 2022. It was not until June 3 that the DOJ sent a team of lawyers to Mar-a-Lago to pick up the envelope of 31 classified documents Trump turned over in response to the subpoena, meaning that Trump had almost a month to find the classified documents, or as Smith’s prosecutors seem to believe, move them around Mar-a-Lago so they would not be found first by Corcoran during his “diligent search,” and then by the Department of Justice when they came to pick up the proffered envelope of documents in June.
Trump’s former lawyer Cobb has his own take about why Trump likely faces indictment and conviction in the classified documents case. He told CNN that from what he knew, Smith “has a tight case” that is ready for the grand jury to issue an indictment because Trump has “lied” about the documents with such frequency since the National Archives first asked him for return of the documents way back in 2021.
Referring to what charges the DOJ is likely to bring, Cobb told CNN, “I would not necessarily expand the case to try to prove the Espionage Act piece of it because there is so much evidence of guilty knowledge on the espionage piece that all they really have to do is show that Trump moved these documents at various times when DOJ was either demanding them or actually present.” He went on to explain, “[Trump] filed falsely with the Justice Department, had his lawyers file falsely with the Justice Department, an affidavit to the effect that none existed—which was shattered by the documents that they then discovered after the search—and the many other misrepresentations that he and others have made on his behalf with regard to his possession of classified documents."
And Cobb is not the only former Trump attorney with an opinion about the case. This time it’s Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr with bad news for the former president. In an interview on CBS News, Barr told reporter Catherine Herridge, "It's very clear that he [Trump] had no business having those documents. He was given a long time to send them back and he was— they were subpoenaed. And if there's any games being played there, he's going to be very exposed."
Violation of the federal obstruction of justice statute, which appears to be the charge Smith is pursuing with the grand jury, carries a sentence of 20 years in prison.
Donald Trump had better butter up former White House aide and rabid racist Steven Miller and his Nazi pal Nick Fuentes for endorsements of his own racism and antisemitism, because Trump is going to need them when he applies for membership in the notorious prison gang. He’ll be needing to pick a place for his Aryan Brotherhood tattoo as well. An example of a tattoo that might fit on Trump’s capacious backside is pictured here:
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
Lice so severe that even kerosene couldn’t kill them. Shoeless feet padding aimlessly. Gross malnourishment.
That’s how people described the Yellow Hammers, a semi-isolated colony of the ostracized and downtrodden in Illinois that developed during the Reconstruction Era.
The history of the Yellow Hammers is murky. As the legend goes, a Colonel Brodie of the Civil War — it doesn’t include a first name — came home to Alabama, the Yellowhammer State, and relocated to Wilmington, Illinois where he purchased several acres of wooded land and invited anyone from his home state to come live on it, creating essentially an encampment people called “Brodie’s Woods.” Those people who relocated to Wilmington from Alabama were impoverished, almost permanently, and made pariahs in the community as they huddled on Brodie’s land.
The pariahs’ poverty prevented those among them who were employed from purchasing their own equipment so they used company tools — when they were able to work — whose handles were painted yellow.
These stories, reported by a high school student, can’t be confirmed. First, the only nineteenth century colonel named Brodie was about 12 years old when the Civil War started. One William Brodie from Alabama fought in the Civil War but there’s no record of his being a colonel. A now defunct local Chicago newspaper, the Surburbanite Economist, reported in 1970 that an area of Wilmington, Illinois was known as Brodie’s Woods, but that’s one of very few verifiable mentions of the area.
The more likely story of the root of Yellowhammer is that a cavalry of soldiers from Huntsville went to Kentucky during the Civil War to aid Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s — history will call him both a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and an innovative warrior — Company A of the Confederate Army. They wore new sharp gray uniforms adorned with brilliant yellow trim. A Confederate soldier in tatters said they looked like the bird the yellowhammer, a type of woodpecker, which was made Alabama’s state bird in 1927. The Yellowhammers ended up becoming valuable team members; they supported several of Gen. Forrest’s victories, one of which frustrated Gen. Ulysses Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign.
That the history of the Yellow Hammers is so hard to pin down says quite a bit about the state today; tracing what really happens proves difficult. Even though Alabama media tries to cover events inside the prisons, the state of news in 2023 dictates that coverage isn’t as complete as anyone would like.
Just as the history of the Yellowhammers is unclear, the view into Alabama’s prisons is muddied by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) and its commitment to opacity. The officials who run that system do not like looksies. Early this year, ADOC stopped releasing the number of in-custody deaths on a monthly basis, ostensibly because there were so many that they either couldn’t keep up or didn’t want to be embarrassed by their inability to protect the state's wards.
Nevertheless, the reports of carnage that keep dripping out — two men were murdered on May 15, 2023, an additional pair added to a list of over 60 since January 1, 2023 — have contributed to a narrative that men and women in Alabama prison are incorrigible, even feral, when all they’re doing is adapting to the environment that the state has established for them.
The truth is that a good number of them are quite high-minded. When they staged a strike last fall, they didn’t even protest the squalid conditions they live in, which happen to be deplorable. Instead they sought policy reform on sentencing and parole which will ultimately benefit people beyond them.
Their strike demands were imminently reasonable, despite Gov. Kay Ivey’s disagreement. But the demands were really only part of the story of the strike. My sources tell me that — under the guidance of some dedicated leaders who I won’t name now — rival gangs and sworn enemies convened in good faith to hammer out what they needed to ask for. In that respect, they’re behaving better than many of us on the outside if they can display that type of comity. They came together despite the fact that they worry every day — along with family and friends — that they’ll be killed or starved. They’re fighting back non-violently. Bravely.
And even effectively. Because of the strike demands, lawmakers introduced two bills poised to pass the Alabama legislature. First is a bill that would mandate the right to attend one’s own parole hearings by video (they can’t attend these crucial proceedings now) and second is a bill that would allow people serving life sentences to petition to have their punishment reduced. Most prison work stoppages achieve nothing. This group of men and women convinced people to listen and act. Do not count these people out.
That doesn’t mean the wind is under their yellowhammer wings. Gov. Ivey just signed a bill into law that reforms the so-called “good time” statute by making it harder to earn time off one’s sentence because ADOC failed to take the good time of someone who attempted escape. Their resilience doesn’t mean they’re safe now or being treated justly. It’s just the opposite.
Alabama’s prison population reflects a lot of their yellowhammer history. Like woodpeckers, they’re tenacious fighters. Much like the Yellowhammer Cavalry in 1862, they're nimble, capable of putting up a few wins, but then ultimately forgotten.
And they aren't living much differently than Brodie’s Yellow Hammers. Some aren’t supplied shoes and therefore aren’t allowed in the chow hall. As I have reported before, the ADOC intentionally starves them when they assert their rights. They wander, often squatting in dorms where they’re not assigned because they want to avoid being raped. The violence doesn’t cease; I hear reports of outright beatings that all too often result in lost “good time” but no medical treatment. And they huddle, displaced and ostracized, in one of Alabama’s 15 state-sanctioned colonies of fear and panic.
But unlike the legend of Brodie’s Woods, these tales are true and verifiable. There’s no fiction here. It’s traceable. It tracks, all too well.
That’s why today The National Memo announces an unflinching series that goes inside Alabama’s criminal legal crisis: the Yellowhammer Files. We’re going to trace and track data and stories until something changes. Check these files as they are published and you will be stunned by what you read.
Chandra Bozelko served more than six years in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent. Her work has earned several professional awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Los Angeles Press Club, The National Federation of Press Women and more.Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.
