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The Many Crimes For Which Trump Hasn't Been Indicted -- Yet

The Many Crimes For Which Trump Hasn't Been Indicted -- Yet

How quickly we forget some of the outrageous acts Donald Trump was accused of committing while president. Let us review:

We begin with Trump’s incitement of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and his multi-pronged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election by illegal means. There was his attempt to strong-arm the Georgia secretary of state into “finding” enough votes that Trump would be declared victor in that state. Trump also called Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and urged him to call a special session of the legislature at which the election results would be thrown out and a new slate of electors appointed. He called the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House and attempted to strong-arm him into doing the same thing with the Pennsylvania legislature.

Trump met in the White House with members of the Michigan legislature and urged them to take similar steps in their state. He also made numerous phone calls to state officials and legislators in other battleground states, trying to pressure them to throw out the results of the elections in their states and submit slates of fake electors to the Congress. These calls resulted in the appointment of fake slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump’s phone calls and meetings about submitting fake slates of electors would appear to be an overt act in furtherance of an attempt to interfere with a legitimate function of the government, i.e., the certification of electoral ballots on January 6.

Trump was behind attempts in several states to get law enforcement agencies to seize voting machines and turn them over to the Trump legal team. Voting machines were seized by officials or Trump-backers in Georgia and Colorado and voting machine data was copied by people working on Trump’s behalf in Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona. Tampering with voting data is illegal in every state in the Union, as is conspiracy to tamper with such data. Trump was in direct contact with his lawyer, Sidney Powell, who filed numerous lawsuits in battleground states on his behalf and was behind attempts to seize voting machines in Michigan and tampering with voting machine data in Nevada and Colorado.

Trump met with Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn in the Oval Office where they discussed suspending the Constitution, imposing martial law, and “re-running” the election using the U.S. military. Discussing such illegal schemes amounts to a conspiracy to overthrow the legitimate functions of the federal government, and the conspiracy need not bear fruit, i.e., be carried out, in order for an indictment for engaging in the conspiracy to be brought. The plot to impose martial law went far enough and was taken seriously enough that on December 18, Army Chief of Staff General James McConville and Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy issued a joint statement telling all active-duty Army forces that "There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

And then of course there is the matter of Trump’s theft of government documents from the White House and his refusal over a period of 18 months to return them to the federal government, specifically to the National Archives, where they belonged. He is currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for having violated no less than three federal statutes involving obstruction of justice (he defied a subpoena and appears to have attempted to silence certain witnesses), mishandling of national security information (over 100 highly classified documents seized by the FBI from his office and residence at Mar a Lago) and the theft of the documents themselves.

There are unresolved allegations by the Mueller Report that Trump engaged in multiple acts of obstruction of justice and obstruction of a congressional committee. Mueller held that a sitting president could not be indicted and so dropped the matter. Trump isn’t president anymore. He’s indictable on every count of obstruction established by Mueller’s investigation. In case you forgot or haven’t checked lately, the Mueller investigation lasted nearly two years, from May of 2017 to March of 2019. The Mueller report itself survives, as does all the evidence his team of investigators painstakingly amassed, currently held by the National Archives.

The New York Times reported today that six countries spent more than $750,000 at the Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. while their officials were attempting to influence the Trump administration on behalf of their governments. The House Oversight Committee previously estimated that the Trump Hotel received as much as $3.7 million from foreign governments between 2017 and 2020. Trump refused to put his assets in a blind trust during his time in the presidency, instead turning over the running of his many businesses to his sons Eric and Donald Jr. and his daughter Ivanka. All the proceeds of Trump’s businesses go directly to Donald Trump as the sole owner of more than 500 separate companies under the umbrella of the Trump Organization.

The Trump Hotel, which was located in the Old Post Office building in Washington D.C. while Trump was president, is one of his companies, thus all profits derived from the hotel would accrue to his benefit. The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause states: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. An emolument has been defined as anything of value including money. Trump’s profiting from monies spent at his hotel in Washington would appear to violate the U.S. Constitution, which is the Supreme Law of the Land.

And now we arrive at another late-breaking Trump crime. The New York Times also reported today that John Kelly, Trump’s second and longest-serving chief of staff, revealed to the paper that Trump had, on multiple occasions, attempted to have the IRS conduct audits of his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe. On other occasions, Trump discussed with Kelly having the Department of Justice and the IRS investigate Hillary Clinton, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who also owns The Washington Post), Peter Strzok, the lead FBI agent working on the Mueller investigation team, and Lisa Page, another FBI agent with whom Strzok was having an affair, and with whom he exchanged text messages critical of Trump.

No audits were conducted by the IRS on the incomes of either Comey or McCabe during the time Kelly was White House chief of staff. However, after Kelly left that position and Mark Meadows was appointed in his place, the IRS audited both Comey and McCabe, conducting a type of extensive audit described by experts as “an autopsy without being dead.”It is a violation of federal law for any federal official, including the president, “to request, directly or indirectly” that the IRS audit or conduct any kind of investigation of specific American taxpayers. Trump’s conversations with Kelly appear to fit the definition of that crime.

I’m sure I’ve missed something. Trump was a very busy man when it came to lining his own pockets, retaliating against political rivals and enemies, and attempting to either fix the results of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, or in the case of the 2020 election, overturn its results. He seems to have committed enough crimes while in office to make even the second most corrupt president in recent memory, Richard Nixon, swivel in his grave.

It appears likely at this writing that the Department of Justice will seek to indict Trump on multiple counts of interfering with government operations, the mishandling of national security information, and obstruction of justice. The DOJ has seated two grand juries in Washington D.C., where they have presented multiple witnesses over the past year. One grand jury is hearing evidence on Trump’s crimes surrounding January 6 and his attempts to overturn the election of 2020. The other grand jury is hearing evidence concerning his theft and mishandling of government-owned documents after he left office.

Which is precisely what matters today. Donald Trump, who believed he was invulnerable while he was president and so did pretty much anything he decided to do and damn the consequences, is now a civilian. He is, in a word, indictable, whether he makes himself a candidate in the next presidential election or not.

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.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Peter Navarro Excoriates Top Trump Aides In Grievance-Laden Memoir

Peter Navarro Excoriates Top Trump Aides In Grievance-Laden Memoir

Peter Navarro — former President Trump’s indicted ex-trade adviser — lambasts Trump’s chiefs of staff, from his “Cabinet of Clowns” to his “Motley Crue of Chiefs,” in his upcoming MAGA-themed book, titled Taking Back Trump’s America, as The Daily Beast reported Tuesday.

Taking a cue from Trump himself, Navarro’s laid into his former White House colleagues, including all four of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, while remaining loyal to his ex-boss.

In an excerpt of the forthcoming insult-ridden book, obtained by the Beast, Navarro said three of Trump’s choices for chief of staff — Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney, and John Kelly — were competing for the title of “worst chief of staff in history.”

“You should normally expect a murderer’s row of highly polished media killers in the cabinet secretary pool,” Navarro wrote. “Regrettably, this was just not so in Trump Land.”

Navarro’s penchant for name-calling and right-wing conspiracy-peddling has held firm since his time in the White House, given that he is buddies with disgraced and thrice-indicted War Room podcast host Steve Bannon, who served as Trump's "chief strategist."

Like Bannon, Navarro couldn’t resist defying a subpoena demanding his cooperation in the House Select Committee’s January 6 investigation, which earned him a contempt of Congress criminal charge in March. Navarro was also sued by the government last month for refusing to hand over private emails he used to conduct public business during his time at the White House.

Navarro, the Justice Department said in its filing, “has refused to return any Presidential records that he retained absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents,” according to the Washington Post.

Despite mounting troubles with law enforcement, Navarro has found time to settle scores with his ex-colleagues with a litany of excoriating descriptions, which he had often done on Bannon’s podcast, while seeking to turn a profit.

In his book, Navarro called former treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin a “media hound,” who “spoke like a robot”—“often with an uncomfortable nervous tic around the corners of his mouth”— and “got the most airtime,” per the Beast. Mnuchin, said Navarro, was an “uncomfortable cross between cringe-worthy and a Wall Street hack.”

Navarro described Alex Azar, the former Health and Human Services Secretary, as “always punctilious” and slammed three former cabinet members — Steve Hahn, FDA Commissioner; Robert Redfield, Centers for Disease Control director; and Francis Collins, who headed the National Institutes of Health.

He wrote that Hahn, Redfield, and Collins would, if given a chance, “throw POTUS under the bus even faster than Azar—as would other key officials like the insufferably pompous [former assistant secretary of health] Brett Giroir and of course, the king of stepping on White House messaging, Saint Fauci,” referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Bad as they all were, Navarro thought one White House figure deserved the “worst chief of staff” title. It was Meadows, he wrote, who had achieved that “distinction.'.

Yet Navarro wasn’t done. He tagged Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, “the wrong, small, and inexperienced man for a very big job”; second chief of staff John Kelly, “a trucker” recruited “to drive a Formula One car”; and Mick Mulvaney, the ex-president’s third chief of staff, a “smug” man with “an overabundance of both arrogance and hubris," whom Trump constantly trolled “so he never got comfortable in the job.”

“The more Mick begged,” Navarro jeered, “the more permanent his ‘acting chief’ status would become.”

At Issue, Navarro indicated, was Mulvaney’s failed attempt to dismiss questions about Trump’s reported pressure campaign on Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in an October 2020 press conference. “Get over it,” Mulvaney told reporters. “There's going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

”That single press conference was the beginning of the end for Mulvaney even as it underscored yet again the inability of the White House to dominate the news cycle,” Navarro said.

A representative for Trump stayed mum when asked for comment on Navarro’s allegations, as did representatives of Mnuchin, Meadows, and Kelly. The Beast said it couldn't reach representatives of Azar and Priebus for comment. But Mulvaney fired back with a stinging reference to an “imaginary” friend that made an appearance in one of Navarro’s old books.

“Peter Navarro used an imaginary friend to justify many of his economic hypotheses,” Mulvaney told the Beast

'Ludicrous, Complete Fiction': Ex-Officials Mock Trump Claims About Declassifying Papers

'Ludicrous, Complete Fiction': Ex-Officials Mock Trump Claims About Declassifying Papers

Several former Trump Administration officials have slammed assertions that former President Trump issued a “standing order” to declassify documents he took from the Oval Office to the White House residence.

After the FBI’s August 8 raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence — during which 11 sets of classified documents, including some labeled “top secret,” were seized — Trump’s team issued a statement that stated "a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them."

According to CNN, 18 former top Trump Administration officials — some of who the network didn’t identify to spare them Trump’s retaliation — said they didn’t hear of such an order during their time in the White House and that assertions of such an order were false.

Trump took to social media after the raid to insist that the documents at Mar-a-Lago were no longer classified.

Many of the officials who spoke to CNN laughed at the claims made by Trump and derided the notion of such a standing order as “laughable,” “foolish,” and “total nonsense.” A senior administration official, CNN said, called the claim “bullsh*t.”

"Nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given," said John Kelly, a former Trump White House chief of staff. "And I can't imagine anyone that worked at the White House after me that would have simply shrugged their shoulders and allowed that order to go forward without dying in the ditch trying to stop it."

Mick Mulvaney, another Trump chief of staff to speak to CNN, dismissed the notion, saying he wasn’t “aware of a general standing order” during his tenure.

“Official after official scoffed at the claim Trump had a standing order to declassify documents that left the Oval Office and were taken to the residence,” CNN noted in its report.

A senior White House official called the “standing order” claims “nonsense,” saying, "If that's true, where is the order with his signature on it? If that were the case, there would have been tremendous pushback from the Intel Community and [the Department of Defense], which would almost certainly have become known to Intel and Armed Services Committees on the Hill."

Security experts have also disputed the blanket claims of declassification emanating from within the circle of Trump’s allies, saying such an order would leave a paper trail and not “just be an idea in his head.”

“It can’t just be an idea in his head. Programs and officials would have been notified. There is no evidence they were,” David Laufman, former chief of the Justice Department's counterintelligence division, told CNN.

“The president is the ultimate classifier and de-classifier — but he can’t just wave a magic wand, and he can’t do it in secret,” Douglas London, a former CIA agent, told ABC News.

“If [Trump] and his allies are defending his handling of these documents by claiming that they’re no longer classified, they need to show the paper trail,” he added.

In a piece published by Lawfare, Jeh Johnson, a former Defense Department attorney and Obama Administration Homeland Security secretary, called Trump’s “standing order” claim “nothing short of laughable.”

"[P]art and parcel of any act of declassification is communicating that act to all others who possess the same information, across all federal agencies," Johnson wrote. "This point holds true regardless of whether the information exists in a document, an email, a power point presentation, and even in a government official's mental awareness. Otherwise, what would be the point of a legitimate declassification?"

Olivia Troye, former Vice President Mike Pence’s ex-homeland security adviser, called the blanket declassification claim “ludicrious” and said that "there would be a paper trail of this blanket authority being the case, and in two and a half years of working in national security in the White House, not once did I ever hear this discussed."

Rolling Stone reported on Thursday that FBI have been grilling several ex-Trump staffers to ascertain if anyone beside Trump was privy to the former President’s issuance of such a tall order.

However, the classification status of the documents seized by the FBI from Trump’s abode in Florida “doesn’t really matter, as it’s likely that Trump’s actions broke the law,” according to Truthout.

“What’s listed in the search warrant is fascinating both for what it includes and what it doesn’t include,” a former general counsel of the National Security Agency, Glen Gerstell, told NPR, referring to the Espionage Act statute in the search warrant federal investigators executed at Mar-a-Lago. “What it doesn’t include…is a statute that makes it a crime to knowingly remove or retain classified documents,” Gerstell added.

Grisham Memoir Shows Why Trump’s Second Term Would Be Even Worse

Grisham Memoir Shows Why Trump’s Second Term Would Be Even Worse

Amid the many grifters, misfits, bunglers, liars and toadies who served President Donald Trump, heroes are hard to find. But even in this loathsome group, a few people did eventually grow weary of wallowing in the muck. One of them is Stephanie Grisham.

As White House press secretary, she had the dubious achievement of never holding a press conference, which is akin to an Olympic swimmer never getting wet. But Grisham has written a book in which she tries to atone for her sins by providing fresh evidence of what we already knew about her former boss.

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