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Granted Immunity In Documents Case, Trump Aide Patel Must Talk -- Or Else

Granted Immunity In Documents Case, Trump Aide Patel Must Talk -- Or Else

How does an obsessively loyal Trumpazoid like Kash Patel, who once swaggered down the wide halls of the E-Ring in the Pentagon as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense (an enormously powerful position even if he held it for only two months) find himself between a rock, the Department of Justice, and a hard place, Donald Trump, on this sunny day in November?

Well, he was put there by the men he served, Donald Trump at the top of all of them. Yes, they were all men – from Devin Nunes, whom Patel served when he was Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; to John Bolton, Trump’s third National Security Adviser, under whom he served as a “senior director” in a position created especially for him; to Richard Grenell, Acting Director of National Intelligence, whom Patel served as a principal deputy; to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, who was appointed after Patel reportedly urged Trump to fire the previous Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, for being disloyal to the president by refusing to have active duty troops deployed to put down protests after George Floyd was killed in the summer of 2020.

I realize that’s an unusual number of acting directors Patel served under, but hey! It was the Trump administration, and he couldn’t be bothered with meddlesome stuff like the Senate confirmation process, so Trump just kept appointing acting directors, letting them serve the time they were statutorily permitted and then moving them along in favor of the next acting director. So, Patel himself did a lot of acting, too, serving in senior positions in important places in the government like the Department of Defense and the Office of National Intelligence. Indeed, “acting” is a good name for Patel’s jobs, because what he did in those positions was not really to serve as a deputy, or whatever the other jobs he held were called, but rather to keep the acting director he reported to in line for his real master, who was always Donald Trump.

In that way, Patel was like one of the party enforcers Stalin sprinkled throughout his government and military, whose jobs were never to, say, carry a rifle in the army, or push papers in some corner of the bureaucracy, but rather to report back through the Communist Party chain of command to Stalin himself on whether the department head they nominally worked for were adequately loyal to the great man himself. Under Stalin, this led to a series of purges of top government officials. With a few tweaks and tucks, something of the same thing happened repeatedly throughout the Trump administration, as officials were continually forced out of their jobs. Their replacements were invariably less qualified than the people they succeeded, but far more loyal to the man at the top.

The problem with this kind of system is that it creates a paper tower of power, a structure of leaders who are not leaders at all, but rather what we might call loyals -- underlings dedicated to carrying out the orders of one man, in this case, Donald Trump. Kash Patel was an enforcer within Trump’s house of cards administration, and in order to be trusted with such an important job, Patel’s own loyalty had to exceed the loyalty of those he was not only reporting to, but reporting on. Thus, Patel found himself, or more likely wormed himself into, positions where his loyalty to the big boss at the top ended up giving him unusual access to what that big boss was doing, and not only that, but to the motives behind the orders he gave.

The thing that governments and large organizations like corporations or even academic institutions have in common when they are driven by leaders who demand excessive quantities of loyalty is simple: The point is never really to do the job at hand but to do what you’re told no matter what. If you are part of such an organization or government you know at all times that if you don’t toe the party line, or more likely, the line of the authoritarian leader at the top, you’re out.

What such authoritarian leaders have in common is that they hardly ever do the hard work of governing or, say, in an academic institution, teaching. What they do is give orders. Orders are words, and for them to be become the actual work of the organization, someone must carry them out.

Enter Kash Patel and water carriers like him. Because of his intense loyalty to Trump – he was among a very few loyalists who followed Trump into civilian life and has worked for him since he left the presidency – Patel was trusted with overseeing some of the products of one of the former president’s chief obsessions – the investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Trump appointed him as one of his representatives to the National Archives, where much of the work-product of the Russia investigation resides. And according to Patel himself, Trump involved him in the decisions he made about the classified documents he removed from the White House and took to Mar a Lago.

Patel has told reporters that Trump declassified all the documents he took from the White House, a claim that neither he nor Trump has backed up with any documentation. Whether or not Trump declassified the documents may not matter in the investigation by the Department of Justice into Trump’s handling of the documents, because two of the criminal statutes Trump is thought to have violated do not require that the documents in question be classified. One statute involves obstruction of justice, and the other involves the removal and mishandling of so-called “national defense information,” which need not be classified to be subject to the statute.

This is why Patel today finds himself on the horns of a very, very difficult dilemma. The DOJ is intensely interested in the documents Patel claims to have knowledge about. Because Trump, like other authoritarian leaders gives orders, he must rely on others to carry them out. Patel is one of those who was apparently given orders concerning the documents of concern in the DOJ investigation, so he is thought to have knowledge about what Trump intended to do with the documents he took from the White House, and he may even know what Trump’s motive was for taking them.

When he previously testified before the grand jury, Patel claimed his protections under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, doubtlessly leading the DOJ to conclude that he has something to hide, which if he revealed might subject himself to prosecution. Yet now that he has been granted immunity from prosecution, Patel can’t claim the Fifth. He must answer questions from the grand jury truthfully or subject himself to prosecution for perjury, if not for the offenses he may have committed that he had avoided talking about by taking the Fifth the first time he testified before the grand jury.

How do you stay loyal to a man like Trump when you know if you tell the truth about what he did and why he did it, you might contribute to his being charged with federal crimes?

The New York Times reported yesterday that Patel has “told associates that he was expected to take on an even more central role in Mr. Trump’s legal defenses, currently coordinated by another Trump adviser, Boris Epshteyn, according to a person familiar with his comments.” Epshteyn has testified before the Georgia grand jury that is investigating Trump’s attempts to put together fake slates of electors and the former president's call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to “find” enough votes for Trump to be declared winner of the presidential election in Georgia. Federal investigators looking into Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election seized Epshteyn’s cell phone in September.

So how about that? The two lawyers Trump has put in charge of his defense against potential charges in multiple investigations in multiple jurisdictions are themselves the recipients of grand jury subpoenas and themselves are potentially subjects of criminal investigations.

Not to worry. Patel appears to be counting on Trump winning the 2024 presidential election, which would return him to the White House and give him the power to pardon Patel, Epshteyn, and everybody else involved in both the documents case and attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Not only that, Patel is counting on his loyalty to Trump paying off big-time. On Monday, Patel appeared on “The Benny Show,” a pro-Trump podcast, where he was asked – get this – if he would accept an appointment to be Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation if Trump wins in 2024.

That would be the same FBI that is investigating not only Trump but Patel himself and is behind his subpoena to testify at the grand jury in Washington that is looking into Trump’s mishandling of top secret documents he took from the White House in 2021 and refused to give back to the government for more than 18 months, defying a subpoena and having one of his lawyers lie on an official document certifying that she had turned over all the documents he took to Mar a Lago.

The New York Times quoted Patel as telling the interviewer on “The Benny Show” this: “I’m all in with the boss, and you know that. First, I tell people, let’s win the midterms. And then let’s see what he does and, you know, you and I think I know what he’s going to do. And then it’s a two-year lift and you know what, they’re going to come after us.”

Patel would know. “They” are already after “the boss” and Patel himself, who now faces a grand jury appearance where he will be forced to tell what he knows about “the boss” or he, too, will face indictment.

How about that for a dilemma horn up your ass, huh?

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

Inside Trump's Web Of Lawyers, Lies, And Money With Kash Patel

Inside Trump's Web Of Lawyers, Lies, And Money With Kash Patel

Kash Patel has found himself in trouble this week for one thing: his loyalty to the twice-impeached sexual abuser and grifter, Donald Trump. The Washington Post reported last week that 11 Trump associates, campaign aides, allies, and friends “have been convicted or pleaded guilty in recent years to various offenses, with their total sentences nearing 30 years of imprisonment.”

Patel, a lawyer and former aide to looned-out former California Representative Devin Nunes, also served in some mysterious capacity on Trump’s national security council, as the chief of staff to the Director of National Intelligence, and as chief of staff to Trump’s final secretary of defense, Christopher Miller. Currently, Patel is on the board of the company that owns Trump’s Truth Social media platform, along with his former boss, Nunes, who is CEO of the company. In the tradition of other aides, followers, partners, employees, and political associates of Donald Trump, Patel now finds himself where so many have gone before him: in the crosshairs of the Department of Justice.

Trump had wanted to appoint Patel as a deputy director of the FBI and when that notion was shot down, as deputy director of the CIA, but that appointment also failed under pressure from within his own camp. Patel, it seems, wasn’t very popular among other Trump sycophants. Attorney General William Barr, for example, told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would become deputy director of the FBI “over my dead body.”

Patel is what they used to call in the old U.S. Cavalry a horse-holder: an enlisted aide who saddled and held onto the bridle of a cavalry officer’s horse as he prepared his gear and mounted. They were a necessary part of the cavalry as constituted for deployment in battle. In later years, after the cavalry was disbanded, the term “horse-holder" became a pejorative used to describe junior officers who put themselves at the beck and call of senior officers, ever-seeking a chance to kiss their superiors’ asses and get promoted.

Another apt word for the Patels of the political world, especially those around Donald Trump, is puppies.

Other Trump associates violated the law and went to prison – or like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn, were pardoned – for offenses as various as lying to the FBI, running fund-raising scams, bank fraud, or obstruction of justice. One was even convicted on child sex crimes. Patel, on the other hand, finds himself sadly on the wrong side of the Department of Justice basically for doing what he was told by the man on whom he had modeled himself. He lied for the Big Liar himself when he told interviewers that he had witnessed Trump declassifying all the highly sensitive classified documents removed from the White House and taken to Mar-a-Lago. Whether Trump told him to lie, or asked him to lie, or Patel simply took it upon himself to lie for the man to whom he has been loyal since his time on the NSC, is unknown.

But it is an issue for DOJ prosecutors who are investigating Trump’s handling of all the 22,000 documents – classified and unclassified, both – he took to Mar-a-Lago and then resisted turning over for more than 18 months to the National Archives, where they belonged. Prosecutors are said to be looking at Patel for obstruction of justice, or conspiracy to obstruct justice, with his public lies about Trump’s declassification of the stolen documents. Early in October, prosecutors put Patel before the Washington, D.C. grand jury investigating Trump’s handling of the classified documents found in Trump’s residence and office at Mar-a-Lago when the FBI searched the place in August. Patel is reported to have refused to answer questions from the grand jury, citing his protection against self-incrimination afforded by the Fifth Amendment.

Which is his right, of course. But it was his own boss who famously said during one rally speech or another, “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” To which prosecutors appear to have answered, "Indeed, Kash, what’s up with all your skittishness answering questions about the classified documents you claim you saw Trump declassify when he was still president?”

To that end, DOJ prosecutors have made a filing with a federal judge in Washington asking that Patel be compelled to testify to the grand jury. The DOJ is said to be contemplating giving Patel immunity from prosecution. Under such an immunity deal, Patel would have no protection under the Fifth Amendment and could be compelled to testify about his knowledge of Trump’s handling of the classified documents taken from the White House. The New York Times calls this “a move Mr. Patel’s lawyers have strenuously opposed.”

And no wonder, because it is right here, folks, that it gets very, very interesting. The identity of Patel’s lawyers takes us way deep, and I mean way deep, into the multiple investigations swirling around the role that Trump played in the January 6 insurrection -- and extend to a conspiracy to defraud the government, interfere with an official function of the government, and of course to mishandling the classified documents Patel says he saw Trump declassify.

In a story about Patel’s grand jury testimony, CNN described Patel’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward, as he “ducked out of the ongoing Oath Keepers trial where he is a defense attorney for another defense client to escort Patel, wearing a bold red plaid jacket, down from the grand jury meeting area and out of the building.”

Got that? Patel’s lawyer is also the lawyer for one of the Oath Keepers on trial for sedition in the D.C. federal courthouse, Kelly Meggs, founder of the Florida branch of the Oath Keepers and husband of Connie Meggs, who goes on trial early next year for everything up to but not including sedition -- namely, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, aiding and abetting obstruction, conspiracy, and entering restricted grounds [the Capitol] on January 6, 2021.

I am sure you will also be interested to know that lawyer Woodward is likewise the attorney of record for Walt Nauta, the former White House valet who DOJ prosecutors have questioned twice about his movement of boxes out of the basement storage room at Mar-a-Lago, after a subpoena had been issued to Trump demanding return of those boxes of documents and other materials he had taken from the White House to his resort/hotel/residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

Prosecutors are seeking a third interview with Nauta, who was seen on Mar-a-Lago security video moving the boxes. Nauta is said to have told DOJ investigators during his first interview that he moved the boxes at the direction of Donald Trump. In his second interview, however, after he had hired Stanley Woodward as his lawyer, Nauta contradicted his earlier testimony and said he could not recall who told him to move the boxes. That’s why prosecutors are seeking a third interview with Trump’s former White House valet, who is now serving the same function for the former president at his Florida residence.

Woodward’s co-counsel in the Oath Keepers sedition case is another lawyer in the Trump orbit, Juli Haller. Politico describes her this way: “Juli Haller was part of Donald Trump’s legal brigade in Michigan, filing a lawsuit alongside the ubiquitous Sidney Powell that claimed absentee vote counts were likely manipulated by a computer algorithm developed by allies of deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez.” Politico says Haller was one of nine lawyers sanctioned in the Michigan case and was ordered to pay the city of Detroit’s legal fees and was referred by the judge for possible disbarment. The judge in the case called Haller’s lawsuit “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”

Politico reports that Haller was also involved in at least four additional bogus lawsuits on behalf of Trump in other states, including Arizona, where her case was dismissed by a judge who said in his decision that the plaintiff [Donald Trump] was “sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence.”

According to a complaint filed by several attorneys against Haller and other lawyers involved in the phony Trump election fraud lawsuits with the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission, she and her fellow Trump lawyers “notably failed to disclose to the court that their false factual claims had been dismissed in state courts,” and made numerous other deceptive statements to the court. According to the complaint filed with the Grievance Commission, when Haller and the other attorneys were given a chance to defend the claims they made in their Trump lawsuits, they “voluntarily” withdrew the suits in lieu of offering “a factual defense.”

In other words, Haller and her team of Trump lawyers, who were operating under the direction of Sidney “release the Kraken” Powell, cut and run.

But while Sidney Powell faces disbarment proceedings in Texas, Juli Haller is still in the game on the side of MAGA extremists in the Oath Keepers, apparently representing not only Kelly Meggs in the current sedition case, but his wife Connie in her upcoming trial early in 2023.

Lawyers, guns, and money? In Trumpworld it’s lawyers, lies, and money. Who is paying for Woodward to represent Kash Patel and Walt Nauta? We don’t know. Who’s paying the legal bills of husband-and-wife Oath Keepers, the mighty Meggs? We don’t know that, either.

But the slug-like creep of Trump and his lawyers, liars, and thugs continues, leaving slime on everyone and everything they touch.

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

FBI Seeks Third Interview With Trump's Valet On Mar-a-Lago Documents

FBI Seeks Third Interview With Trump's Valet On Mar-a-Lago Documents

Rats scuttled into their holes all around Washington, D.C. this morning as news arrived that prosecutors running the investigation of Donald Trump’s handling of classified and non-classified documents he took from the White House in January of 2021 are seeking a third interview with a witness who was seen on Mar a Lago video security footage moving boxes from the basement storage room at Trump’s resort/hotel/club/residence.

The New York Times reported that the witness in question is a former Navy cook from Guam who worked in the White House mess before becoming a personal valet to Trump. He has been described as the guy who brought Trump his Diet Cokes in the Oval Office. After Trump lost his attempts to overturn the election and was forced to leave the White House, the former valet, Walt Nauta, followed Trump to Mar-a-Lago in Florida and apparently took up the same duties as a private employee of the former president. It was in this capacity that prosecutors saw Nauta moving the boxes on the video footage from Mar-a-Lago.

The security video footage shows Nauta carrying the boxes as he exits the Mar-a-Lago storage room into a short hallway in the basement. The security footage apparently ends there and does not show where Nauta took the boxes.

In an interview earlier this year, Nauta told DOJ investigators he carried the boxes from the storage room to Trump’s residence at the direction of the former president. During a second interview, Nauta was apparently “less specific,” about who told him to take the boxes to Trump’s residence, according to today’s report in the Times. DOJ prosecutors are seeking a third interview with Nauta to clear up the apparent discrepancy between the first and second interviews.

According to the Times, prosecutors did not show Nauta the security video footage when they interviewed him, indicating strongly that the security footage may be the source of at least some of the DOJ’s questions about Nauta’s veracity during his first two interviews. Prosecutors have also taken testimony from other witnesses who work at Mar-a-Lago and may have information from them which contradicts what Nauta has told them.

According to the Times, “at some point while Mr. Nauta was engaged with the Justice Department about the boxes, he changed lawyers, hiring two Washington criminal defense attorneys.” Washington D.C. criminal defense attorneys specialized in white-collar crime do not come cheap. There have been reports that lawyers hired by people questioned during the Russia investigation charged upwards of $1000 an hour, which raises an interesting question: How did a valet working at Mar-a-Lago come into the kind of money it would take to hire such lawyers? Trump has been paying his own legal bills with money he has raised for his Save America PAC, which he formed days after the TV networks called the 2020 election for Joe Biden. It is not known if Trump has paid Nauta’s legal bills, although it has been reported that the Trump superPAC has paid the bills of other Trump associates who have become wrapped up in the various investigations faced by the former president.

The DOJ is also investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election of 2020, including his involvement in the formation and submission of slates of fake electors to the Congress on January 6.

The DOJ has put Kash Patel before the D.C. grand jury investigating Trump’s handling of the top secret Mar-a-Lago documents. Patel is a former Trump administration official who served in various capacities over the four years Trump was in the White House and was appointed by Trump as one of his two representatives to the National Archives concerning the documents he removed from the White House.

Without providing any evidence that it happened, Patel has told reporters that Trump declassified all the documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago. The Times reported today that sources in Washington say that Patel took the Fifth Amendment multiple times while giving testimony to the grand jury investigating the documents case. Prosecutors believe that Patel can provide information about Trump’s intentions regarding the documents recovered during the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in August. Recall that they found 22,000 documents, including 103 folders of classified material, some of it with the highest security markings that the government can bestow on secret documents.

One of the crimes Trump is suspected of committing is obstruction of justice. Both Patel and Nauta could provide information about why Trump took the documents in the first place, and ordered them moved around after he had been issued a subpoena demanding that he return the documents. Trump refused to comply completely with the subpoena, and it was only after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago that the 22,000 documents were recovered by the government.

According to the Times, the DOJ is now debating how it can force Patel to testify before the grand jury again. It’s a difficult question, because there are pluses and minuses involved in giving a witness immunity from prosecution. The Times reported that the DOJ may be considering other options, such as trying to get Patel to cooperate by threatening him with prosecution but offering a deal for lesser charges or a reduced sentence if he agrees to cooperate in the investigation.

Good luck with that, DOJ. Patel is a slimy little creature who once worked for Devin Nunes and was involved in the great secret documents incident early in the Russia investigation when Nunes, who was on the House Intelligence Committee, announced that he had “found” documents “proving” that President Obama had spied on Trump campaign officials. The documents Nunes “found,” which did no such thing, were actually handed to him in the offices of the National Security Council by Kash Patel, who then worked there in some minor capacity.

Patel’s loyalty to Trump sent him on to bigger and better things. During his last days as President, Trump tried to appoint Patel as deputy director of the CIA, a move that was successfully blocked by Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel. Then he tried to appoint Patel as deputy director of the FBI -- which according to his memoir, former Attorney General William Barr told Mark Meadows, then White House chief of staff, would happen only “over my dead body.”

Both moves by Trump to elevate Patel to positions in the FBI and CIA are thought to be related to Trump’s obsession with the Russia investigation. In his capacity as Trump’s representative to the National Archives, Patel attempted to declassify documents from the Special Counsel investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The National Archives refused to declassify the documents and make them public, as Patel had demanded on behalf of Trump. Patel reportedly has knowledge about the initial removal of the 22,000 documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. Busy, busy, busy has been Kash Patel as a loyal worker-bee for Donald Trump. And now busy, busy, busy he must be with his lawyers trying to fight being hauled before the Washington grand jury yet again.

All of the recent reporting about the witnesses the DOJ has called to testify before its Washington grand jury and the matter of Walt Nauta indicate that the investigation of Trump’s removal of classified and non-classified documents from the White House, and their handling once under his control at Mar a Lago, is far from over.

I’m on the story. Watch this space.

Trump's Secret Mar-A-Lago Files: The Unanswered Questions

Trump's Secret Mar-A-Lago Files: The Unanswered Questions

  • 1.Why did Trump choose to hide certain specific files and not others at Mar-a-Lago? What were the criteria that Trump used to keep some files concealed and not others? Who selected those files? Did Trump consult or direct anyone in his selection of secret files? Trump was notorious for being too impatient to read his briefing papers, even after they had been drastically shortened and simplified. Is there the slightest evidence that he spirited these papers away so that he could consult or study them? Who besides Trump knew of the presence of the files he had concealed at Mar-a-Lago?
  • 2. Mar-a-Lago has an infamous reputation for being open to penetration even by foreign spies. In 2019, the FBI arrested a Chinese woman who had entered the property with electronic devices. She was convicted of trespassing, lying to the Secret Service, and sentenced and served eight-months in a federal prison, before being deported to China. Have other individuals with possible links to foreign intelligence operations been present at Mar-a-Lago?
  • 3. Did members of Trump's Secret Service detail have knowledge of his secret storage of the files at Mar-a-Lago? What was the relationship of the Secret Service detail to the FBI? Did the Secret Service, or any agent, disclose information about the files to the FBI?
  • 4. Trump's designated representatives to the National Archives are Kash Patel and John Solomon, co-conspirators in the investigations into Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016, the Ukraine missiles-for-political dirt scandal that led to the first impeachment in 2019, and the coup of 2020. Neither has any professional background in handling archival materials. Patel, a die-hard Trump loyalist whose last job in the administration was as chief of staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense, was supposedly involved in Trump’s “declassification” of some files. Patel has stated, “Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves."
  • The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified.” If Pat Cipollone, the White House legal counsel, did not “generate the paperwork,” was he or anyone on his staff aware at all of the declassifications? The White House Staff Secretary Derek Lyons resigned his post in December 2020. Did his successor, who held the position for a month, while Trump was consumed with plotting his coup, ever review the material found in Trump’s concealed files for declassification? Or did Patel review the material? Can Patel name any individual who properly reviewed the supposed declassification?
  • 5. Why did Trump keep his pardon of Roger Stone among his secret files? Was it somehow to maintain leverage over Stone? What would that leverage be? Would it involve Stone's role as a conduit with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers during the coup? Or is there another pardon in Trump’s files for Stone, a secret pardon for his activities in the January 6th insurrection? Because of the sweeping nature of the pardon clause, pardons can remain undisclosed (until needed). Pardons are self-executing, require no justification and are not subject to court review beyond the fact of their timely execution. In other words, a court may verify the pardon was valid in time but has no power to review appropriateness. A pardon could even be oral but would need to be verifiable by a witness. Do the files contain secret pardons for Trump himself, members of his family, members of the Congress, and other co-conspirators?
  • 6.Was the FBI warrant obtained to block the imminent circulation or sale of information in the files to foreign powers? Does the affidavit of the informant at Mar-a-Lago, which has not been released, provide information about Trump’s monetization that required urgency in executing the warrant? Did Trump monetize information in any of the files? How? With whom? Any foreign power or entity? Was the Saudi payment from its sovereign wealth fund for the LIV Golf Tournament at Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club for a service that Trump rendered, an exchange of anything of value or information that was in the files? If it involved information in the files was it about nuclear programs? Was it about the nuclear program of Israel? How much exactly was the Saudi payment for the golf tournament? The Saudi sovereign wealth fund gave Jared Kushner and former Trump Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin $2 billion for their startup hedge fund, Affinity Partners. Do the Saudis regard that investment as partial payment for Trump’s transfer of nuclear information? Were Kushner or Mnuchin aware of the secret files at Mar-a-Lago?
  • 7.Did Trump destroy any of the files? If so, when? Did those files contain incriminating information? Did he destroy any files after he received the June subpoena?
  • 8.Were any of the secrets of our allies compromised? Has the U.S. government provided an inventory of breaches or potential breaches to our allies?
  • 9.Does the resort maintain a copying machine near the classified documents that Trump hid? Were any of the documents copied or scanned? Are Trump’s documents at Mar-a-Lago originals or copies? Were any copies shown or given to anyone?
  • 10.Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb has revealed that a video surveillance system covers the places where Trump hid the files at Mar-a-Lago, and that the system is connected to a system at his other residences at the Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey and Trump Tower in New York City. According to Bobb, Trump and members of his family observed the FBI search and seizure of his files at Mar-a-Lago, “actually able to see the whole thing” through their surveillance system. Who has that surveillance system recorded entering the rooms where the files were kept?