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Tag: classified documents
Special Counsel Nearing End Of Trump Classified Documents Probe

Special Counsel Nearing End Of Trump Classified Documents Probe

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that one of the two investigations being conducted by special counsel Jack Smith is nearing an end. That investigation involves Donald Trump’s improper removal of documents from the White House, his refusal to turn over material to the National Archives, and his potential mishandling of classified documents—including documents classified above “top secret.”

Smith was appointed last November by Attorney General Merrick Garland and given the task of investigating two separate potential crimes involving Donald Trump. One of those concerned Trump’s actions in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, including his efforts to solicit false electors, appropriate voting machines, pressure Mike Pence to ignore votes, and encourage the violence on January 6, 2021. That investigation is still underway with Pence recently testifying before the grand jury, while Smith seems to have extended his queries into Trump using false election claims to scam money from his supporters.

The classified documents investigation has seen a series of witnesses in recent weeks, including Secret Service agents who were stationed at Mar-a-Lago during the period when Trump refused to return documents or lied about having returned them all. Last Thursday, one of Trump’s attorneys on the classified document case abruptly quit. That came just as the National Archives informed Trump’s legal team that they were sending Smith a series of messages between Trump and his advisers showing that he was warned about the proper steps to declassify material.

On multiple occasions, Trump has made the claim that he “automatically” declassified all the documents. However, there is no mechanism by which that could happen. The messages provided by the National Archives reportedly show discussions between Trump and his advisers in which it was apparently made clear that he needed to take formal steps to declassify documents before leaving office. Trump failed to take those steps.

Some of the documents that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago were reportedly connected to national defense. That includes a reported document discussing Iran’s potential development of nuclear weapons.

Had Trump attempted to declassify these documents, there likely would have been pushback both from the intelligence community and the Pentagon. This might have drawn considerable attention to the information Trump was attempting to declassify.

If he had succeeded, the documents would have been broadly available. By taking the documents without actually declassifying them, Trump was in possession of information that was of very limited availability and which held considerable potential value to foreign intelligence.

Some of the questions asked of the Secret Service agents reportedly concern who might have had access, since Trump kept some of the most highly classified documents in his personal office rather than in the storage room where he had promised to keep them in advance of sending them to the archives.

As just one example, last year Donald Trump joined with the Saudi Arabian government in a series of golf tournaments known as LIV Golf. For 2023, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund has reportedly put up $2 billion for a tournament that will be hosted at Trump’s New Jersey course. It’s not difficult to believe that representatives of the Saudi government visited Trump’s office—the same office where he was holding secrets concerning their longtime enemy, Iran.

Putting aside the classified documents, it’s clear that Trump also made repeated violations of the Presidential Records Act, refusing to turn over material to the archives, or lying about material he was holding as well as trying to get his attorneys to lie to the archives.

With all of that, it’s not surprising that The Wall Street Journal reports Trump’s team is expecting indictments to be handed down. What’s astounding is how they are preparing for this event.

Some of Trump’s close associates are bracing for his indictment and anticipate being able to fundraise off a prosecution, people in the former president’s circle said, as clashes within the Trump legal team have led to the departure of a key lawyer.

Trump’s associates’ first thought is not how to defend him from criminal charges; it’s how much money they can scam from his followers by sending out emails that will surely include the phrase “witch hunt.” Most states have laws that prohibit criminals from profiting from their crimes after convictions, but Trump has that handled: He scams his gullible followers for millions upfront.

Considering the numerous investigations still open, including investigations into the 2020 election by both Smith and Fulton County, Georgia, Trump will probably have plenty of opportunities to send those fundraising emails—because it looks like there will be plenty of indictments.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Trump Attorney Warned Him Against Defying Secret Documents Subpoena

Trump Attorney Warned Him Against Defying Secret Documents Subpoena

Former President Donald Trump was warned last year that holding onto classified documents after he was subpoenaed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for their return to the National Archives could amount to obstruction of justice, according to records shared exclusively with The Guardian over the weekend.

"The previously unreported warning conveyed to Trump by his lawyer Evan Corcoran could be significant in the criminal investigation surrounding Trump's handling of classified materials given it shows he knew about his subpoena obligations," the outlet reports.

Noting special counsel Jack Smith's probe into why "Trump World" failed to return the requested materials, "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. The activity was captured on subpoenaed surveillance footage, though there were gaps in the tapes," The Guardian reveals.

"The warning was one of several key moments that Corcoran preserved in roughly 50 pages of contemporaneous notes described to The Guardian on the condition of anonymity, which prosecutors have viewed in recent months as central to the criminal investigation," Washington correspondent Hugh Lowell writes.

"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," Lowell continues, adding that "the notes ended up before the grand jury in Washington hearing evidence in the case after a US appeals court allowed attorney-client privilege to be pierced because judges believed Trump might have used Corcoran's legal advice in furtherance of a crime."

Lowell also explains from the notes that the room in which boxes filled with top-secret records were kept "might have been left unattended" during Trump World's search — which because it was incomplete prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to execute its own search warrant last August.

Furthermore, Trump was reportedly "irritated" with the subpoena as well as the "unusually detailed nature" of Corcoran's written accounts.

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

Classified Documents Found In Unprotected Area At Pence Home

Classified Documents Found In Unprotected Area At Pence Home

Cue the rewrite squad: Republicans are scrambling for new talking points. CNN reports that an attorney for Mike Pence has located “about a dozen” classified documents at Pence’s home in Carmel, Indiana.

That’s pretty amazing, considering the confidence with which Pence answered this question.

From that same interview with Pence, in which he was feigning astonishment at the idea that Joe Biden might have left the White House with classified documents after his term as vice president, Pence said:

"There would be no reason to have classified documents, particularly if they were in an unprotected area."

Where were the documents found inside former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home? In an unprotected area.

That interview wasn’t the only time Pence claimed he had no classified documents. He has made this claim repeatedly, especially as Republicans have attempted to use documents found in the home of President Biden to make demands—ranging from more investigations of Biden, to claiming this makes Biden ineligible to run again in 2024, to insisting that the Justice Department drop the investigations into documents Donald Trump refused to return, to insisting that Biden should resign.

Pence’s attorneys now state that a “small number” of classified documents were “inadvertently” boxed and transported to Pence’s home in Indiana. The statement also insists that Pence was unaware of the documents.

We can only assume that the next step is for Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel. After all, Garland appointed an investigator to look into the documents at Biden’s home on January 12. In fact, Garland went out of his way to appoint an investigator who had been appointed as a U.S. attorney by Donald Trump and was well known as a hard-line conservative to investigate the documents at Biden’s home.

Surely that means an attorney appointed by Biden or Obama will be appointed as a special counsel to look into the documents at Pence’s home. After all, Garland insisted that appointing such an investigator for Biden was necessary to show the independence of the Justice Department.

If Garland doesn’t appoint another such investigator now, it will be nothing short of a signal that the DOJ goes easy on Republicans. Scratch that. It will be another signal.

And when it comes to any comparison between what Joe Biden did and what Donald Trump is still doing

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

No Comparison: The Biden And Trump Classified Documents Cases

No Comparison: The Biden And Trump Classified Documents Cases

Stay tuned for more coverage of this and other political stories. Buying a subscription would certainly help out as I post more of these screeds.

I’m getting a creepy feeling this subject is going to be talked about all year and into the next, making it prime meat as a campaign issue against President Joe Biden if he decides to run for reelection. And there is more: Be forewarned that the fairness doctrine doesn’t apply in politics.

Today, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee wrote to the White House and asked for the visitor logs for Biden’s house in Wilmington, Delaware. "Without a list of individuals who have visited his residence, the American people will never know who had access to these highly sensitive documents," Rep. James Comer (R-KY) wrote to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain.

Take a deep breath before you read the next sentence. No, the House Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee didn’t send an equivalent letter to former president Donald Trump, asking for visitor logs for Mar-a-Lago. Can you imagine? They would have to send a box truck for the Mar-a-Lago logs, with all the weddings and fund raisers and Christmas and New Years celebrations held there every year.

As the New York Times proved in an excellent interactive photo piece a couple of months ago, there were not one, but two entrances to the Mar-a-Lago ballroom that had direct access to the stairway above it, at the top of which was Trump’s office, from which many of the most sensitive classified documents were recovered by the FBI during their August search of the property. There would also have to be a list of the many, many employees of caterers and staff of Mar-a-Lago who had access not only to the ballroom, but to the storage room in the basement where the chairs for events in the ballroom were stored. As we know, Trump kept classified documents in the basement storage room where there was no lock until the Department of Justice demanded that one be installed in June of last year.

Asked on a CNN Sunday morning show why he hadn’t requested visitor logs from Trump for his club/hotel/residence, Mar-a-Lago, Comer replied, "I don't feel like we need to spend a whole lot of time because the Democrats have done that for the past six years.”

So, there you have it: This is the way what must now be referred to as the Trump/Biden classified documents cases will play out between now and November of 2024. Remember all the excuses the Trump people and Republicans made for the presence of hundreds of classified documents recovered by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago? Oh, the documents ended up there because of the chaotic packing-up of Trump’s White House in the final days before January 20, 2021. It’s just a simple disagreement with the National Archives. Trump wasn’t aware of what was down there in some musty storage room in Mar-a-Lago! That was handled by underlings.

And of course, they argued that everybody did it, meaning that every president accidentally took classified documents from the White House when they left office.

That one stings a little, given the recent drip-drip-drip of stories about classified documents turning up in Biden’s garage (locked, he pointed out the other day) stored alongside his vintage Corvette.

James Sauber, one of the White House counsels, announced last week that “a small number” of classified documents had been found among Biden’s papers at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington. Then more classified documents were found at Biden’s home in Delaware. On Saturday, the White House said that five more pages of classified documents were found at Biden’s Delaware residence. In each case, the documents were reported to the National Archives (NARA), which sent people to retrieve them.

I hardly have to remind you what happened in the case of the Trump documents, but here it goes: NARA began to seek documents it thought had been taken by Trump from the White House back in mid-2021. Trump stiff-armed them until the NARA officials informed his lawyers that the agency was turning the case over to the Department of Justice. Suddenly, in January of 2022, Trump turned over 13 boxes of documents to the NARA, which found classified documents among them.

The DOJ stayed involved and sent a subpoena for classified documents to Trump in May. Trump’s lawyers responded in June, turning over an envelope containing several classified documents to representatives of the DOJ at that time. They also had one of Trump’s lawyers – who worked for his Super PAC – sign a statement saying the documents were recovered during a diligent search of Mar-a-Lago. It didn’t amount to a sworn statement that they had turned over all the classified documents Trump had, but it was close.

The DOJ developed information, apparently from employees in Mar-a-Lago, that there were more documents stored there, and in August executed a search warrant. They recovered 13,000 more documents from the basement storage room. Among those and other documents from Trump’s office were 113 more classified documents. The DOJ started calling Trump employees before a Washington D.C. grand jury. It turned out that several of those employees had lawyers paid for by organizations run by Trump, such as his Super PAC. Several of the Trump employees took the Fifth Amendment during their grand jury testimony.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, who was serving as a war crimes prosecutor at the Court of International Justice at the Hague, as special prosecutor. He took over the documents investigation and has issued new subpoenas for more testimony about the documents case, as well as the investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Now a second special prosecutor, Robert Hur, has been appointed to investigate the Biden classified documents. Biden’s lawyers have announced that they are fully cooperating with the investigation. In contrast, Trump filed suit in a Florida federal court last year to stop the use of the classified documents in the DOJ investigation, delaying the investigation for several months while the case wound its way not once, but twice, through the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Finally, the 11th Circuit threw out Trump’s lawsuit. The “special master” process that had been ordered to go through all 13,000 of the seized documents was ended and the documents – all of them, classified and unclassified – were returned to the DOJ for their investigation.

So, you get the picture: Trump took thousands of documents from the White House on purpose and fought tooth and nail for two years to keep them and to stymie both the NARA and the DOJ. Biden took a small number of classified documents with him when he left the vice presidency – we don’t know the number, but it’s more than ten – and immediately turned them over to the National Archives and is cooperating with the DOJ and the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the case.

You can depend on House Republicans to continue to make a big deal about the Biden classified documents while pooh-poohing what Trump did. What else is new? It’s who they are, and it’s who Trump is, but it’s going to be a pain in the collective ass of the Democratic Party. House Republicans are writing letters and making requests now, but they will follow up with subpoenas – the same kind of subpoenas that multiple Trump witnesses either avoided or completely refused to comply with – Hi, Steve Bannon! – and we’ll hear about every single one of them, no matter what they end up proving – Hi! Benghazi Committee!

I hate to say this but watch this space. We’re only halfway through January. It’s promising to be a very, very long year.

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.

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