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Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

You’re going to love this: the latest brief in the Mar-a-Lago documents case came from Stephen Miller. Yes, that Stephen Miller, the one who came up with the plan of ripping babies out of the arms of their mothers at the Southern Border. He still defends it as a good idea and has given interviews saying there are plans to repeat the policy of breaking up families if Trump is elected in November.

Miller has another wonderful idea this time -- that it was just fine for Donald Trump to leave the White House in 2021 taking a truckload of top-secret documents with him, because they were Trump’s secrets, not the government’s. Miller’s right-wing legal operation, the America First Legal Foundation – old Stevie just can’t get away from those intimations of the Nazi era, can he? – filed a friend of the court brief with Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida supporting Trump’s position that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) allows him to do whatever the hell he wants to with his White House papers.

The PRA allows no such thing. The act, passed by Congress after the criminal presidency of Richard Nixon, requires every president to turn over all papers deriving from his time in office to the National Archives. Miller’s little nest of right-wing legal mice say the PRA doesn’t apply to Donald Trump because, well, because Donald Trump says so.

It's a little more complicated than that, but not by much. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a reply brief to Miller’s 28 pages of legal blatherings. Leaving aside its signature page and certificate of service, Smith’s reply brief is all of five pages long. Smith uses a single word to describe the three contentions of Miller’s legal arguments: Wrong.

Reading the Special Counsel’s brief, you can feel him wearying of replying to Trump’s blizzard of filings in the cases Smith has against him in Washington and Florida. Trump’s basic position, backed up most recently by his loyal underling Miller, is this: Yeah, I did it, but you can’t get me because I’m Donald Trump.

Miller’s brief supporting Trump takes the utterly absurd position that the charges against him in the Mar a Lago case must be dropped because they all derive from a criminal referral by the National Archives, which spent 18 months practically begging Trump to turn over his trove of secrets before they called the FBI. Miller’s legal brief says the National Archives can’t call the FBI because all they are is a records depository and don’t have the statutory authority to report a crime. According to Miller’s MAGA theory, the National Archives needs a “regulation” to be allowed to pick up the phone and report a crime.

Smith, with Job-like patience, points out that if Miller is right, that means if a thief enters the National Archives and starts waving a gun around, it would be impermissible for the Archives to call the cops. Smith’s brief points Judge Cannon to the fact that the National Archives, as an entity of the federal government, has an inspector general on its staff, and by federal regulation, all inspector generals are “required to report expeditiously to the Attorney General whenever the Inspector General has reasonable grounds to believe there has been a violation of Federal criminal law.”

The Special Counsel has had to file response after response to motions made by Donald Trump to dismiss charges against him, and every one of those motions takes the same position. Yeah, he did it, but this is why you can’t go after him. He’s immune from prosecution. The prosecution is “selective and vindictive.” Because everybody else got away with it, so should Trump.

Trump is accused in the Mar-a-Lago case of removing important national security information from the White House and failing to secure it by storing top-secret papers, including some that contained secrets about nuclear weapons, in places like a bathroom and a ballroom. But that’s okay, according to Trump’s lawyers, because according to yet another case against Trump, “the President’s actions do not fall beyond the outer perimeter of official responsibility merely because they are unlawful or taken for a forbidden purpose.”

Judge Tanya Chutkan had it right when she dismissed Trump’s first claim of absolute immunity. What he wants is a get of out jail free card. Reelecting Trump will give him a whole pocketful. Every time he holds a rally, he promises to free “the January 6 hostages” with presidential pardons.

That’s bad enough, but what we’ve really got to be afraid of is his promise to turn around and put his enemies in jail. At his rallies, “lock her up” has turned into a chant of “lock them up.”

Remember, we are them.

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.

Why Trump Tried To Trade 'His' Classified Papers For Russia Probe Secrets

Why Trump Tried To Trade 'His' Classified Papers For Russia Probe Secrets

I guess we should have assumed right from the beginning that Russia Russia Russia was back there somewhere behind Trump’s removal of thousands of documents from the White House when he left office. Among them were hundreds of highly classified documents containing some of the nation’s most important national security secrets, including, we have learned, at least one document marked Top Secret/ Compartmented Sensitive Information, concerning nuclear weapons.

On Saturday, Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times reported that last year, as the National Archives was fruitlessly seeking the return of a dozen or more boxes of documents and other materials Trump had taken from the White House in January of 2021, Trump discussed with his lawyers trying to make a deal to trade the documents he had illegally taken for “a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims” that he had been wronged by the FBI and the Mueller investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia. “In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida,” the Times reported.

But is this an aha moment, or not? The Times seems to think it isn’t, describing the offer to make a trade with the National Archives as just “one in a series that demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.”

However, Marcy Wheeler, of the Emptywheel blog, thinks it is a very big aha moment. Read on to learn why.

The Times story goes on to describe the chaos in the White House during Trump’s last days in office, when chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone got involved in dealing with “roughly two dozen boxes” of presidential records that had been kept in the White House residence by Trump. Gary M. Stern, the top lawyer for the National Archives, had been in contact with Cipollone before Trump left office about the boxes in the residence and wrote to Trump’s lawyers later in 2021 asking that they be sent to the National Archives to comply with the Presidential Records Act. He continued to go back and forth with more of Trump’s lawyers, as well as with Mark Meadows, as 2021 wore on, without any success.

Finally in the fall of 2021, Stern was in contact with Alex Cannon, a lawyer who went back with Trump all the way to the Trump Organization, worked for the campaign, and finally for Trump’s PAC. Stern told Cannon that although the Presidential Records Act had no provisions for enforcement, the National Archives would involve the Department of Justice in securing the return of the boxes of documents and other materials they believed Trump had taken from the White House.

This produced a scramble between Trump’s lawyers, now including former assistant White House counsel Pat Philbin, and Mark Meadows to try to get the boxes to the National Archives. Trump told his lawyers and aides that the boxes didn’t contain anything of substance and were mostly full of press clippings and other innocuous material. Stern reminded them that anything seen by Trump when he was in office was considered presidential records and had to be gone through by archivists, and anything deemed personal would be returned to Trump.

Cannon was “worried the boxes might contain documents that were being sought in the January 6 inquiry,” and “believed” the boxes might contain classified documents, according to the Times. Cannon also “believed” that nobody on the staff of Mar-a-Lago, where the boxes of documents were being stored, was cleared to handle classified information.

After Cannon, with the assistance of former White House deputy counsel Eric Herschmann, convinced Trump that he could be in serious legal jeopardy if the boxes were not returned to the National Archives, especially if they contained classified documents, Trump consented to personally go through the boxes he kept insisting were “mine,” before the boxes were sent to the Archives, where they legally belonged.

It was “around this time,” according to the Times, that Trump came up with the idea of making the deal: He would give the boxes to the Archives if they would release the Russia investigation documents he believed would prove the whole Mueller investigation and everything that had happened since the campaign in 2016 was a “hoax.” He didn’t know what information the Archives had, but just knew they had stuff he wanted.

According to the Times, Trump’s lawyers disabused him of this notion by telling him that such a deal wasn’t possible because all the material – his boxes of presidential records and the records in the National Archives – belonged to the government, not to him.

So, by December of 2021, Trump knew authoritatively that nothing he had in his possession or wanted from the Archives was his.

Trump allegedly went through the boxes at Mar-a-Lago personally in December. In January, the National Archives sent a truck to Mar-a-Lago to pick up the boxes and drive them to Washington. It wasn’t until they were inside the building of the Archives that it was discovered that mixed in among news clippings, Time magazine covers and the like was a trove of classified documents. At that point the Archives moved the boxes to a SCIF, a Sensitive Classified Information Facility, where the classified documents could be sifted through by people who had been cleared to examine them.

It was the first time since the documents were jumbled up with other materials in boxes in the White House residence that they would be handled by people authorized to see them in a facility designed to store and protect them.

Cannon was asked by Trump to certify that all the documents taken from the White House had been returned to the National Archives. Knowing what he knew by then, Cannon refused, which prevented him from falling down the same Trump Loyalty Rabbit Hole another Trump lawyer, Christina Bobb, fell into when she signed a similar certification in June, attesting to the DOJ after yet another stash of classified documents had been handed over in person to Jay Bratt, the DOJ counterintelligence chief, that all the documents at Mar-a-Lago had been turned over.

They hadn’t. The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago two months later would turn up 27 more boxes of documents and materials Trump took from the White House – 18 more than the National Archives even knew about, according to Marcy Wheeler, the expert Trump-whisperer who runs the blog Emptywheel. [More on Emptywheel anon.] The 27 new boxes seized by the FBI included 100 folders filled with classified information nobody had known about previously, which have been the subject of at least two court-fights between the DOJ and Trump over access to the classified information that was necessary to the DOJ’s criminal investigation of the former president.

The criminal investigation of Trump includes charges of obstruction of justice, outlined in large measure above, and violations of the Espionage Act, which forbids the mishandling of national defense information whether it is classified or not.

So, what’s really going on here? Is the deal Trump tried to make with the National Archives an aha moment, or not? While the Times dismisses it as just another step in Trump’s long journey of delay, distraction, and lies as he tried to hang onto “my” documents, Marcy Wheeler does not. If you’re not reading Marcy’s Emptywheel blog, you’re really missing out. You want to talk about somebody who makes connections others don’t, who’s unafraid to go straight up against whatever conventional wisdom is circulating around Washington, and who isn’t afraid to question the reporting of such media power-mavens as Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt, Marcy is it.

To explain why Trump’s obsession with the Russia investigation would lead him to attempt to trade his trove of secret documents for whatever records the National Archives held on the Mueller investigation, Marcy goes all the way back to a moment in 2017 on the night Trump was returning from the G-20 Summit in Helsinki and his really, really private meeting with Vladimir Putin, at which no notes were taken and Trump did not even use his own translator, relying instead on Putin’s. Trump was on Air Force One when news reached the traveling White House staff that the Times, in a story reported by yes, Haberman and Schmidt, along with Peter Baker, was going to report that a meeting had been held in Trump Tower in June of 2016 between Jared Kushner and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort with at least one known Russian intelligence agent who was offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Trump and Hope Hicks repaired to the presidential office portion of Air Force One to craft a statement explaining away why such a meeting had taken place. The Mueller investigation was already underway. Trump was being hammered daily for his connections with Russia during the campaign. And he had just appeared at a joint press conference in Helsinki alongside the Russian president at which he was asked by a reporter, who do you believe about Russian involvement in the presidential campaign? Your own intelligence agencies, which reported unanimously that Russia had interfered with the campaign, or Vladimir Putin? Trump answered that Putin had denied it “strongly” during their really, really private meeting, and he believed Putin.

So Trump dictated a statement to be read to the Times reporters over the phone from Air Force One explaining that the Trump Tower meeting with several Russian nationals, including the known Russian intelligence agent, had been about “adoptions of Russian children” by Americans, which had been halted by sanctions imposed by President Obama when news came out that the Russians had interfered in the election entirely on behalf of then-candidate Trump.

There was some speculation about the possibility that emails relating to setting up the Trump Tower meeting might come out and that they would be very damaging, and Trump huddled with his aides to deal with that possibility as well.

Marcy Wheeler makes the excellent point that way, way back in July of 2017, Trump was so cozy with Putin that he basically allowed Putin, after his really, really secret meeting with him, to dictate the statement to the press writing off the Trump Tower meeting as being about “adoptions,” which Marcy quite properly reads as “sanctions,” and recalls that it was sanctions imposed by Obama that were the subject of the infamous phone call between Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn had promised that Trump would lift the sanctions as soon as he took office, and that got Flynn in so much trouble that he lasted something like 17 days as Trump’s national security adviser before he was fired for lying to Vice President Pence about the Kislyak conversation. Flynn also lied to the FBI, which got him indicted and convicted after he pleaded guilty. But that was before he switched lawyers and hired Sidney Powell to represent him and withdrew his plea.

Yes, that Sidney Powell, who would go on to fame as the loser of several dozen court cases over election fraud that did not exist. That was at the same time she was invited to a meeting in the Oval Office with her former client Flynn and Trump at which they pitched the idea of imposing martial law and having the United States Army (!) re-run the election so that Trump could stay in office.

Trump wanted to get his hands on those documents in the deal he tried to make with the National Archives. He said he wanted the documents because they would prove the “Russian thing” was a great big hoax. But I ask you, and Marcy Wheeler asks you: What do you think he would have done with boxes of Russia investigation documents, most of which were classified to protect sources interviewed by the FBI and the Mueller team? You think he might have sat on them like he sat on the Mar-a-Lago boxes until the FBI was forced to get a search warrant and go into Mar-a-Lago and seize them? You think that maybe, just maybe, in preparing to run for president again, Trump is so frightened of what is in the boxes of documents exploring every corner of Mueller’s investigation of Russian collusion with Trump’s campaign, that he might just bury them, so he could resume his relationship with the murderous war criminal president of Russia he became so cozy with during his really, really private meeting in Helsinki?

Marcy’s point, and my point, is that when it comes to Trump, it’s all tied together – all of it, Russia and secrets and Trump’s loathing of the intelligence agencies which produced the Top Secret documents he stole and took to Mar-a-Lago.

Watch this space and watch https://www.emptywheel.net. There is much, much more to come.

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

Trump's Big Day With Special Master Doesn't Go Well (For Him)

Trump's Big Day With Special Master Doesn't Go Well (For Him)

Senior Judge Raymond Dearie, sitting in the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn, fired a warning shot over Trump’s head in his first act as special master in the case of the 11,000 documents Trump removed from the White House upon leaving the presidency, which he refused for months to return to the government as required by law.

At issue before Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, and now before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta in the appeal filed by the Department of Justice last Friday, are 100 classified folders containing an unknown number of secret documents which the DOJ wants the Circuit Court to release from Cannon’s stay restricting their use by the FBI and DOJ. Trump has publicly claimed that he declassified the documents in question in multiple tweets and other public statements, but notably, his lawyers have refrained from making the same claim in their filings opposing the DOJ’s motion to release them for use in its criminal investigation of Trump.

Trump’s lawyers have called the classified documents Trump held in Mar a Lago “alleged classified documents,” and Judge Cannon has seemed to question whether the documents are indeed classified as their markings would indicate and which the DOJ has said they are.

In Dearie’s letter to both the Trump lawyers and the DOJ yesterday laying out a proposed schedule for his work as special master, the judge in effect told Trump to put up or shut up about declassifying the secret documents he held. In their response to the judge’s proposed schedule, Trump’s lawyers squawked loudly: “The Draft Plan requires that the Plaintiff disclose specific information regarding declassification to the Court and to the Government,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “The Special Master process will have forced the Plaintiff to fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident in the District Court’s order.”

Got that? For the first time, Trump has allowed his lawyers to acknowledge that he faces a potential indictment, and he does not want to be forced to show his hand before the indictment comes down and the prosecution demands that he do so.

In plain English, Trump and his lawyers are understandably reluctant to answer the judge about whether or not Trump declassified the documents held at Mar a Lago because Judge Dearies has faced them with the option of either telling the truth or lying. Having gotten away with lying in public for his entire adult life, Trump is clearly uncomfortable with the position he has put himself in: legal proceedings in court, before a judge, require that parties tell the truth, and lies told by either the plaintiff – Trump – or his lawyers are punishable.

Trump’s problem is that he took a whole slew of classified documents out of the White House, which the government subsequently seized, but he has no corresponding documents proving his statements that he declassified them. If they had been declassified, the documents themselves would have markings declaring them to be “declassified.” None of the documents seized from Mar a Lago or turned over to the National Archives or to the DOJ have such markings.

Declassification is a complicated and lengthy process. If a document is to be declassified, it must be sent to the agency which first classified it to be reviewed. At this point, the agency can object to the declassification and provide reasons why it should remain secret. If there are no objections, the document is sent around to other intelligence agencies or to the Department of Defense, if the DOD had used the document, and those agencies get an opportunity to review it and object to its declassification on the grounds that it might compromise ongoing operations, endanger a human source used in the production of the document, or reveal sources and methods of obtaining intelligence.

After this lengthy process, the document is returned to the agency which produced it for a final review and formal declassification. At that point, the document essentially becomes a record that would be available to the press and to the public via a Freedom of Information application, or it might be publicly released by the person or agency that requested the declassification.

Trump’s big problem is that he wanted secrets, not public information, because secrets have value that publicly available information does not. What good is a classified document if everyone knows what it says? If Trump had in fact declassified the documents in question, there would have been no argument about them in court before either Judge Cannon or the Circuit Court, and certainly there would be no reason for Judge Dearie to question Trump and his lawyers as to whether they had been declassified.

It's a box Trump himself constructed and locked himself into through a combination of arrogance and ignorance. Trump kept the documents because he believed “they are mine,” as he has said several times, an act and allegation of totalitarian levels of self-regard. But he had no knowledge of what is involved in declassifying information because he had never formally done so. He knew all about revealing secrets, as he did when he revealed secret information about Israel to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister only days into his presidency, and which he probably did in his private meeting with Vladimir Putin at Helsinki, which he held without any aides or even his own translator, agreeing to use Putin’s instead.

He could have let the DOJ have the classified documents the FBI took from Mar a Lago and been done with it. Instead, he went into court and asked for a special master to review the documents, and now here he is, having to respond to the demands of the very person he got a federal judge to appoint for the purpose of going through Trump’s professional underwear drawer, as it were.

Welcome to your big day, former President Trump, and good luck. You’re going to need it.

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

O.J. Trump And The Mar-A-Lago 'Plant'

O.J. Trump And The Mar-A-Lago 'Plant'

“This is sad, O.J.” That’s what Ron Shipp, a police officer and friend of O.J. Simpson, said on the stand at Simpson’s murder trial when he learned the defense was trying to suggest that the former football player was framed.

Donald Trump has often been compared to Benito Mussolini, George Wallace and Richard Nixon, with the last two, at least, looking a little better than he does on close inspection. Now add O.J., who — like Trump — tried to cover his guilt with the time-honored approach of so many defendants: by blaming the police.

OK, Trump hasn’t killed anyone (unless you count the roughly 200,000 coronavirus deaths that could have been avoided had he urged masks and vaccination.) But if he did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, his cult followers would rally around him at approximately the same decibel level as they have in the days since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago on Monday.

The torrent of attacks on the FBI and Democrats is not likely to subside much, even after the release of the warrant Friday (a preemptive move by Trump World), which included clear probable cause. We learned that the former president had refused to comply with a subpoena for highly-classified documents that he was hoarding at home. At a minimum, Trump failed to secure nuclear secrets from the prying eyes of the many spies posing as lounge lizards and visiting suck-ups at his club. House Republicans cancelled a press conference after the attack on the FBI office in Cincinnati by a January 6 insurrectionist (later killed by authorities), but they’ll be back on the warpath soon enough, however dangerous their incitement might be. On Friday night, their despicable leader released the names of the FBI agents who searched his mansion, painting a MAGA target on their backs.

Trump’s “Free O.J.!” mob is following a preposterous script. The liars and enablers who make up today’s GOP are trying to cast Attorney General Merrick Garland — the straightest of straight arrows— in the improbable role of Mark Fuhrman, a cop who became more despised during the 1994 O.J. trial than the murder suspect himself. See, Garland is worse than Trump! Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, Jesse Watters and other Trump lackeys now claiming evidence was “planted” at Mar-a-Lago are doing their best imitations of Simpson’s facile attorney, the late Johnnie Cochran, though that is terribly unfair to Cochran.

Let’s just uproot the “planted evidence” argument for a moment. It’s being spread now by Trump himself, a sign that he’s worried about the evidence the FBI has gathered. It goes without saying that his conspiracy-addled cult followers will keep peddling this lie for years. In the O.J. case, Cochran implied that Fuhrman or some other racist and crooked cop planted a bloody sock and a bloody glove and a bloody footprint from a Bruno Magli shoe at the murder scene and in Simpson’s house. This was far-fetched during the Simpson trial but it’s downright plausible compared to what would be required to plant evidence in the Mar-a-Lago case—evidence, of course, that had already been, uh, “declassified”.

Imagine what the FBI would have to do to frame Trump. It’s a helluva lot harder than, say, planting drugs on an 18-year-old Black kid in a bad neighborhood, a crime that is more common than most people assume. Corrupt FBI technicians would somehow have to forge highly-classified documents about nuclear weapons that would then have to stand up in court as authentic. Easy-peasy!

That’s about as much juice as I can squeeze out of O.J. Fortunately there are many other takeaways from last week’s stunning developments:

On the basic question of what motivated the search, I’m of two minds. Since 2015, I’ve operated on the assumption that whenever you think Trump has touched bottom, he crashes through the floor. Given that everything else about him ends up even worse than it first appeared, this would suggest that the documents will turn out to contain Trump’s hand-written notes on the coup plot, his betrayal of the United States at the 2018 Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, or (and!) his apparent determination as far back as 2019 to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Now that he’s out of office and his family is making multi-billion dollar business deals with the royal family in Riyadh, the last of these might be the most likely scenario.

At the same time, there’s a lot to suggest this really is just about mishandling classified material—an offense the government has always taken very seriously, and which DOJ argues in the warrant violates not only the Presidential Records Act but possibly the Espionage Act and statutes on obstruction of justice. Trump and his flunkies are already insisting that as president he had the power to issue a “standing order” declassifying even nuclear secrets without going through any “bureaucratic” process. Nuclear secrets—no biggie. Who cares if some deep state types say this release of this information would pose an “exceptionally grave” threat to national security? Expect to hear that fatuous claim about 5,000 times on Fox in the next couple of years, then again in court.

Could Garland, famous for playing it by the book, have merely been enforcing a subpoena from last spring for the boxes of documents belonging to the government that Trump was refusing to hand over? Now that the secrets are safe, might he call it a day on Trump’s failure to protect them? Possibly so, though it’s more likely the still-sealed government affidavit that accompanied the warrant includes something less “stale,” as prosecutors put it.

William M. Arkin, an intelligence expert and great reporter I know and trust, writes that two sources tell him that there was a “mole” at Mar-a-Lago. The Wall Street Journal confirmed that “someone familiar with the stored papers told investigators there may be still more classified documents at the private club after the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes earlier in the year.” That—not a “weaponized” DOJ—is what precipitated the search warrant.

Trump claims to be buoyed by supporters rallying behind him but he’s got to be worried about exactly what’s in those 27 additional boxes removed on Monday. One of them contained material on Roger Stone and his pardon. Might there be something else in Stone’s files that implicates Trump? Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime fixer, told CNN that his old boss no doubt “feels trapped” and is worried that the source Trump calls a “rat” (spoken like true mobster) has more dirt on him.

Many commentators across the spectrum this week thought that mishandling and withholding classified material was too small a crime to justify prosecuting Trump — as if anything short of the former president committing treason did not justify enforcing the law; as if the Feds in the 1930s should not have prosecuted Al Capone for something as minor as income tax evasion. Really? Law enforcement should retreat in the face of partisan noise and threats of violence?

In my cable news gorging this week, it felt as if many of the same analysts saying that Garland was too aggressive if he didn’t have something earth-shaking were claiming a month ago that he wouldn’t be aggressive enough. The only thing that changed was the simultaneously terrifying and tiresome cannonade from the GOP. It intimidated a surprising number of people into accepting Trump’s frame on the story—until Garland, late in the week, turned the tables.

But of course the carnival of hypocrisy will never close. Trumpsters don’t oppose all law enforcement, only the investigations aimed at them. They’re against defunding the police until they’re for defunding the FBI.

It was only six years ago that Trump got elected in part by harping on Hillary Clinton’s emails, which might have contained classified information unsecured on her private server. He said the issue was disqualifying and delegates to the Republican National Convention — the same people making excuses for him today — chanted ominously: “Lock Her Up!”

Sometimes the hypocrisy is so bald even Trump can’t ignore it. “I once asked [not “once,” about 50 times], ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’” he said after pleading the Fifth more than 400 times on Wednesday in a deposition in a civil suit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. “Now I know the answer to that question.”

As it happens, Trump was correct the first time, though no president should trample on any constitutional right. In civil cases, it’s permissible for a jury to infer guilt from a defendant taking the Fifth. Which is why Trump is likely to owe millions in civil judgments stemming from his financial shenanigans.

In the meantime, the braying of the asses continues unabated. “This is the worst attack on the republic in modern history—period,” the powerful radio host Mark Levin thundered on Fox News. How so, Mark? Because it is “unprecedented”? (A word that newscasters this week turned into a pejorative.)

Kevin Williamson, an anti-Trumpist, had a good response to that in the National Review:

“The FBI’s serving a search warrant on Donald Trump’s residence is not — in spite of everything being said about it — unprecedented. The FBI serves search warrants on homes all the time. Donald Trump is a former president, not a mystical sacrosanct being.”
If we really believe, as we say we believe, that this is a republic, that nobody is above the law, that the presidency is just a temporary executive-branch office rather than a quasi-royal entitlement, then there is nothing all that remarkable about the FBI serving a warrant on a house in Florida.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and the others demagoguing the issue all know better. They know the FBI search did not break or even bend the law. It was the temerity of it that they thought, rightly, would be red meat for the base — the very idea that anyone would dare hold their Dear Leader to account. We’re all so inured to rightwing nonsense that Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) comparing the FBI to the Gestapoflies right past us—as if executing a search warrant is the same as executing six million Jews.

Fortunately, Garland is genuinely non-political, which means he won’t let the political assessment of how his prosecution is “playing” impede his efforts. In fact, the most important — and gratifying — conclusion we can draw from the Mar-a-Lago search is that the long debate over the intentions of the attorney general — does he have the intestinal fortitude to prosecute Trump? — is over. He may not be a flashy hard-charger, but his steady, implacable will to push back against outrageous intimidation and uphold the rule of law — wherever that might lead — is now on the display for the whole world.

On Thursday, Garland skillfully called Trump’s bluff that the attorney general would stay silent while the former president controlled the media narrative. All week, it bothered me that even some good reporters and interviewers fell for Trump’s ferocious spin, and imposed a double-standard that conjured 2016 and boded ill for 2024. I wasn’t alone. Ben Rhodes, a former Obama speechwriter, tweeted:

If Garland’s seriousness about holding Trump to account was the best news of the week, the worst news was how Republicans closed ranks around the former guy. I’m not worried about it in terms of the midterms. The Republicans enraged by the Mar-a-Lago “raid” were already certain to turn out for Republican candidates. It’s hard to imagine swing or sporadic voters (those who usually avoid midterms) coming out in droves because Trump is playing the victim card again.

But this episode may make it more likely that Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024. It gives him something to talk about other than the “stolen” 2020 election, which was boring even some of his ardent supporters. As his cult of personality further solidifies, you’ll see Ron DeSantis’ stock heading south.

It’s scary to watch the Kool-Aid going down the hatch. Here’s Matt Schlapp [Chairman of CPAC]:

“It’s an unshakable bond. People ask the question—Is he the leader? .. Yes, and I think he will be until he takes his last breath.”

His last breath — in the bunker? So even if slam dunk evidence emerges that Trump is a traitor, you wouldn’t criticize him, Matt? There are literally NO circumstances where he is not your leader? This isn’t a smitten insurrectionist saying this. Schlapp was George W. Bush’s White House political director. As head of the American Conservative Union and now CPAC, he’s arguably the leading “conservative” (whatever the hell that means nowadays) in the U.S. today. And all he can say is, “Heil Trump!”

The 2020s are not the 1990s, when peace and prosperity allowed us to distract ourselves with low-stakes melodramas like the O.J. Simpson trial. This is not a drill. I don’t think Trump will be reelected; even before January 6, he never cracked 50 percent approval ratings and had alienated broad swaths of independent voters. But history shows anything is possible when you receive the nomination of a major political party. If Trump is the 2024 GOP nominee and we have a severe recession, he can argue how great his economy was from 2017 to 2020, a misleading but plausible claim, and—with the help of election deniers in key states—slip back into the Oval Office. What would happen next is not a liberal fever dream but, according to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a mortal threat to American democracy. This time, Trump would know what he’s doing. Within weeks, the FBI would be transformed from a “deep state” enemy into the new dictator’s secret police. Bet on it.

Jonathan Alter, a political analyst for MSNBC, writes the Old Goats newsletter on Substack. Alter's most recent book is His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.

Reprinted with permission from Old Goats