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Why Trump Should Be Very, Very Afraid Of Special Counsel Jack Smith

Why Trump Should Be Very, Very Afraid Of Special Counsel Jack Smith

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Let’s take a quick look back at the classified documents cases now afoot in the land. Back in early January, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the classified documents that were found at the Biden Penn Center and in his garage at his residence in Wilmington, Delaware. The special counsel is Robert K. Hur, and he and his team have already interviewed several Biden associates about the documents, which date to his time as vice president under President Obama. All of the Biden classified documents were either turned over to the National Archives voluntarily or found by the FBI when they conducted a search of Biden’s house. The search was done without a warrant because Biden had agreed to cooperate beforehand with the FBI.

Several classified documents were also found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s house by his personal attorney. These documents were turned over voluntarily to the FBI. Then last week, the FBI found one additional classified document at Pence’s Indiana home. CNN reported that the FBI and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice have begun an investigation into how the documents ended up in Pence’s residence, who might have seen them, and whether or not national security might have been compromised by the insecure storage of the documents in a private residence. This probe by the FBI and the DOJ is not criminal in nature at this time, and Pence is cooperating with the investigation.

National security and legal experts don’t expect any charges to result from either investigation, even given the fact that a new special counsel is overseeing the Biden documents case. Biden has cooperated at all times with the FBI and the DOJ, and there is no evidence that he attempted at any time to obstruct the investigation.

That leaves us with the Trump classified documents case, a different creature altogether. As you will recall, the case resulted from Trump having taken many documents with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left the White House in 2021. When the National Archives became aware that certain documents were missing from those Trump turned over when he left office – the famous “love letter” from Korean dictator Kim Jung-un was one of them – they requested that Trump turn over to the archives any documents he had withheld either purposefully or by accident. Months went by before Trump responded in January 2022 by turning over more than 100 classified documents, along with other material.

The National Archives suspected, and the FBI developed evidence, that there were more classified documents that Trump had not turned over. The DOJ issued a subpoena, and last June, several DOJ officials traveled to Mar-a-Lago and met with Christina Bobb, a lawyer then working for Trump’s Super PAC. Thirty-some classified documents were turned over to the DOJ lawyers, along with a letter certifying that a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago had turned up no other classified documents stored there.

The DOJ developed more evidence indicating that statement wasn’t true, and went to court and got a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago. In early August of last year, the FBI conducted a search of the premises at Mar-a-Lago and turned up some 11,000 documents stored there, including 115 additional classified documents that Trump had not turned over.

A court fight initiated by Trump ensued over the documents seized by the FBI. Trump lost the lawsuit and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals returned all the documents at issue, including the more than 300 classified documents, to the DOJ, where they became evidence in a continuing criminal and national security investigation into Trump’s mishandling of the documents.

That investigation, begun by Merrick Garland and the FBI, has been turned over to Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed late last year. In January, a lawyer for Trump turned over a new classified document and a folder with classified markings to the FBI. They were found at Mar-a-Lago during a search by Trump’s lawyers that also turned up a laptop and a thumb drive, onto which were copied documents that were in the box containing the classified document and folder.

And that is where things stood until this week, when it became known that two of Trump’s lawyers were subpoenaed last month to appear before one of the two grand juries hearing criminal cases involving Trump – one overseeing the documents case, and the other overseeing the investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the election of 2020, including the events leading up to the insurrection at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

One of the lawyers subpoenaed was Christina Bobb, who signed the certification that the “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago had not turned up any more classified documents than those turned over to the DOJ in June 2022. The other lawyer is Evan Corcoran, who Bobb told the DOJ had drafted the statement for her to sign, even though Corcoran did not sign it himself. Bobb appears to have given testimony to the grand jury in January that was acceptable to the DOJ, meaning she probably did not plead the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify. Because grand jury testimony is secret, there is no way to confirm this.

Corcoran, however, has turned out to be a different matter. Yesterday, lawyers for the DOJ filed a document with Judge Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge in the federal court covering the District of Columbia, seeking to invoke the “crime-fraud exception” to the attorney-client privilege which normally covers all communications between a lawyer and his or her client, in this case, Donald Trump. The “crime-fraud exception” pierces that privilege and allows prosecutors to compel the testimony of a lawyer if they believe that lawyer has been used by a client in a conspiracy to commit a crime.

The DOJ is thought to want to question Corcoran about who told him to draft the statement signed by Bobb that basically asserted that everything Trump took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, including classified documents, had been turned over in response to the DOJ subpoena. That statement was a lie, as the subsequent search of Mar-a-Lago proved.

What’s going on here? Well, the DOJ is continuing its investigation into whether Trump committed the crime of obstruction of justice, in this case, by obstructing the investigation into his handling of the classified and non-classified documents he stored at Mar-a-Lago. The DOJ notoriously does not like it when the subject of one of its investigations tries to get others to lie for him or otherwise engage in covering up a crime.

Corcoran is in very hot water here. If he is forced to testify and he tells the grand jury that Donald Trump told him to draft the June statement and what it should say, then the DOJ has prima facie evidence that Trump obstructed justice.

One of the legal eagles interviewed on MSNBC on Tuesday night said that the DOJ – comprised of lawyers – is very reluctant to come between a lawyer and his or her client, and going for a “crime-fraud exception” to attorney-client privilege is a last resort they will take only when all other avenues of obtaining information have been stymied by a target of an investigation. Usually, the expert told MSNBC, it indicates that the DOJ is in the final stages of presenting evidence to a grand jury before asking the grand jury to issue an indictment.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has shown exactly zero reluctance to go after Donald Trump for the crimes he is suspected of having committed. That Trump mishandled national security information by storing classified documents in a non-secure facility – the Mar-a-Lago store room, his office, and, it now turns out, his bedroom at his resort, is not even in question. That he sought to delay the investigation into his handling of classified documents was established when he filed his spurious lawsuit that temporarily kept the DOJ from using the documents in their investigation.

Now the question is: Did Donald Trump use his attorneys and others in illegally obstructing the DOJ investigation? It’s pretty clear that Jack Smith is close to getting the answer to that question, and when he does, look for an indictment of Trump to soon follow.

Oh! This just in! It was revealed on Monday that the Special Counsel investigation has been broadened to include looking into Trump’s Super PAC, the Save America PAC, and how it handled the millions of dollars Trump raised after he began his allegations that the election of 2020 had been “stolen” from him. According to the New York Times, Smith’s office has subpoenaed and interviewed what they call “a vast array of Trump vendors,” asking them about how money was paid to vendors and whether some of the vendors subcontracted their services to other vendors. What the DOJ wants to know is “if the payments were for genuine services rendered,” which can indicate only one thing: They suspect that Trump was diverting some of the Super PAC money to himself or his family through phony invoices from phony front-companies with the end result that the money ended up in Trump’s pockets.

Given a choice of whether to tell the truth or lie, Trump will lie every time. Given the choice of whether to pay a bill or stiff someone, Trump will stiff them every time. Given the choice of whether to raise several tens of millions of dollars for a legal purpose and then let it sit there without finding its way into his pockets, Trump will take the money every time.

Folks, Donald Trump is going to be indicted. Bank on 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.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Federal Grand Jury Investigating Trump's 'Save America' Super-PAC Grift

Federal Grand Jury Investigating Trump's 'Save America' Super-PAC Grift

A federal grand jury sitting in Washington D.C. has issued subpoenas aimed at the Save America PAC, the operation Trump formed soon after Election Day 2020 to exploit his lie that the election had been stolen from him. Trump has used the super-PAC to raise funds for his own political future as well as to distribute money to candidates he has endorsed around the country.

This grand jury appears to be separate from the one already investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Subpoenas from this new grand jury were issued to, among others, the execrable Stephen Miller, Trump’s speech writer and senior adviser in the White House, and Brian Jack, Trump’s former White House political director. Miller has been paid by the Trump super-PAC since leaving the White House, and Jack has worked as an adviser to Trump after leaving the White House, as well as for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the House minority leader.

The grand jury has also subpoenaed several other people who worked on the Trump campaign or in the White House in various positions, such as the campaign finance director and the former chief of staff to Ivanka Trump. According to the New York Times, at least one of the new subpoenas was signed by Thomas P. Windom, a veteran fraud prosecutor in the Department of Justice, and another was signed by Mary L. Dohrmann, a federal prosecutor whom the Times reported has been working with Windom in recent months.

The other grand jury has issued subpoenas seeking information about the scheme Trump developed after the election to send fake slates of electors to Congress in order to disrupt the count on January 6 or to throw the election into the House of Representatives. These subpoenas, according to the Times, “sought communications with several pro-Trump lawyers — like Kenneth Chesebro — who helped devise the electors plan.” Other subpoenas were sent to Republican state representatives and senators allied with Trump, as well as to Republican state officials in the states that sent the slates of fake electors to Congress.

The two prosecutors behind the subpoenas seeking information on Trump’s super-PAC have also made appearances in court to oppose a motion by John Eastman to retrieve his cell phone from the FBI, which seized the device last June. Eastman was the Trump lawyer who devised the fake elector scheme and was one of the speakers at the Trump rally on the Ellipse just before the assault on the Capitol on January 6.

The new grand jury and the subpoenas issued to persons associated with Trump’s super-PAC mark a significant expansion of the criminal investigation of the former president, who is also under investigation for his removal of thousands of documents and other materials from the White House when he left office. The documents include at least 100 with classification markings up to the highest, most sensitive secrets the nation has, including several marked TS/SCI, for Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information. This designation is used for documents so secret that they must only be viewed in a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, overseen by an intelligence official who keeps a written record of everyone who sees the documents.

The SCIF at Mar a Lago was taken out after Trump left office. The documents marked TS/SCI, which should have been stored inside such a facility, were found by the FBI in the basement of Mar a Lago in a minimally secured storage room and in a box in Trump’s office, which is located just off the resort’s main ballroom, frequently used for weddings and public events like political fund raisers.

The Save America PAC was registered with the Federal Elections Commission on November 9, 2020, two days after news organizations had called the election for Joe Biden. (If you need evidence that Trump knew he had lost the election, there it is.) The Trump super-PAC has not doled out very much of the money it has raised to Republican candidates endorsed by Trump. “Instead, it has hoarded cash or used it to pay firms and groups devoted to helping Mr. Trump, including his own businesses, or to undermining his enemies,” according to the Times. The super-PAC also has paid lawyers for Trump, including Christina Bobb, who signed the official certification on June 3 attesting that there were no remaining classified documents stored at Mar a Lago. The FBI, of course, found more than 100 new classified documents when it searched the Trump resort/club/residence on August 8. Another lawyer who has been paid by the Trump super-PAC is Lindsey Halligan, whose name has appeared on court filings involving the appointment of a special master to review the documents Trump removed from the White House.

The Save America PAC has also spent more than $200,000 at Trump hotel properties, according to the Times. Profits from the hotels owned by Trump would go directly into the bank accounts of the former president. The Trump super-PAC also paid nearly $8.7 million to Event Strategies, Inc., the company that helped organize the Ellipse rally on January 6.

Why it would take $8.7 million to organize a rally held about 200 yards from the White House is a mystery. Those must have been some very expensive bullet-proof plastic shields protecting Trump and the other speakers at the rally, and they must have been standing on some very expensive sheets of plywood used in the construction of a very expensive stage for the rally.

Or maybe Event Strategies paid inflated salaries to a whole bunch of people who “worked” on the rally, who then turned around and kicked back some of the money to YKW. The acronym this time stands for You Know Who.

For future grand jury updates, watch this space.

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


'Save America' PAC Doled Out $60,000 To Melania Trump's Stylist

'Save America' PAC Doled Out $60,000 To Melania Trump's Stylist

The Save America political action committee, a fund created by former President Trump to push his debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential elections, paid $60,000 to a fashion designer known for styling former First Lady Melania Trump, according USA Today.

The payments, which the committee said were for “strategy consulting,” were doled out to Hervé Pierre Braillard in four installments, with $6,000 paid on April 7 and $18,000 on May 4, June 3, and June 24, USA Today’s Erin Manfield reported, citing Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filings.

Braillard, a French-American designer based in New York, has styled other first ladies, including Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, and Hillary Clinton. Braillard’s work with Melania Trump earned him feature coverage in Vogue and the New York Times while Trump was still in office.

“Mr. Pierre serves as a senior adviser to Save America, involved in event management and special projects,” Taylor Budowich, a senior official with Save America, told news media outlets, making no mention of what the payments were actually made for.

The payments, according to Manfield, “offer a window into one of the many ways Trump, who is not a candidate for any federal office, is allowed to use money in the [Save America] PAC.”

Save America, dubbed “the primary hub of [Trump’s] ongoing political operations” by the New York Times, has received and paid out millions of dollars accumulated from Trump’s political operations.

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection accused Save Americ of receiving most of the $250 million Trump fleeced from his supporters for an “Official Election Defense Fund” that its investigators testified never existed.

"Most of the money raised went to this newly created PAC, not to election-related litigation," Amanda Wick, senior investigative counsel for the select committee, testified on the second day of the public hearings.

“The Federal Election Commission does not allow candidate committees, which are formed to raise money for a specific candidate, to spend money on personal items, including clothing. But Save America is not a candidate committee, it's a leadership PAC, originally designed for politicians to raise and give money to other candidates,” USA Today noted in its report. “They carry fewer restrictions and have been criticized as slush funds.”

Indeed, under law, politicians with leadership PACs have broad authority to spend the money they raise as they see fit.

In June, a non-partisan and non-profit group tracking money in U.S. politics, Open Secrets, found that the PAC had paid millions of dollars to Trump-aligned organizations. One of them is Event Strategies Inc., a Trump-affiliated firm that reportedly received millions from the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and other Trump PACs.

Save America gave out the maximum $5,000 donations permitted by law to Trump-endorsed election deniers contesting in Republican primaries across the country, yet “tens of millions of dollars in donor money is left over,” USA Today noted in its report.

Non-profit news source Bridge Michigan found last week found that eight of nine Trump-endorsed GOP candidates nominated in state legislative races had received donations exceeding “lawful contribution limits” from Save America. However, the candidates had yet to return the “excess contributions.”

Ann Ravel, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, expressed to USA Today her concerns about the evolution of PACs and the need for their regulation.

"For so long the whole point of leadership PACs, even when they were set up, was to kind of ingratiate yourself and help your other Congress-people or other political candidates, but that's apparently pretty much gone by the wayside," Ravel said. "It's in desperate need of regulation."

Long After Trump's Election Lawsuits Failed, Cash Poured Into His Coffers

Long After Trump's Election Lawsuits Failed, Cash Poured Into His Coffers

The House Select Committee, tasked with probing the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, is detailing how former President Donald Trump invented, disseminated, and cashed in on baseless conspiracies of widespread voter fraud that his senior advisers counseled him weren’t true.

On the precipice of electoral defeat, Trump — seeking to supercharge his fundraising efforts — bombarded his supporters with millions of ominous emails requesting donations for an “Election Defense Fund,” which he said would help him “fight back” against voter fraud engineered by the “left-wing mob.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a select committee member who played a leading role in the panel’s second day of hearings, detailed the fundraising campaign to the American people.

“We found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” Lofgren said in her closing statement for the hearing.

Lofgren argued that the devious fundraising tactic, driven by the Big Lie, allowed Trump to pull off a “big ripoff,” conning his supporters to the tune of $250 million. “So not only was there the big lie, there was the big ripoff,” Lofgren added.

The committee played a video near the end of its second hearing detailing how, between November 2020 and early January 201, the former president sent his supporters up to 25 donation request emails a day, raising falsehoods that judge after judge rejected, including some he appointed.

"Claims that the election was stolen were so successful, President Trump and his allies raised $250 million, nearly $100 million in the first week after the election," said Wick, senior investigative counsel for the committee.

"Most of the money raised went to this newly created PAC, not to election-related litigation," Wick said. She also said committee lawmakers found out that this PAC, the Save America PAC, gave millions in contributions to pro-Trump organizations.

The select committee trailed the money and outlined its findings: $1 million of the donation pool went to the Conservative Partnership Institute, a charity run by Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. $1 million to the America First Policy Institute, a small organization that hires many former Trump staff and champions the former president’s political vision.

The Trump Organization got $204,857 for the hotels it owned, and the company that ran Trump’s January 6 rally outside the White House, Event Strategies Inc., gulped $5 million.

In an interview with CNN that aired after the hearing, Lofgren disclosed another startling expenditure: Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancee, got “paid $60,000 for the introduction she gave at the speech on January 6.” According to the Washington Post, Guilfoyle's speaking fee was financed by Publix supermarket heiress and laundered through Turning Point Action, a far-right activist group close to Trump Jr.

Guilfoyle has been under scrutiny for reportedly receiving large payments from third-party companies — remuneration that didn’t need to be reported to the Federal Election Commission.

According to the Washington Post, millions of dollars continued to pour into the Trump campaign coffers even after its last election lawsuits were thrown out of court. The campaign pulled in $62 million in the first half of 2021 and $23 million in the latter part of the year, months after the crash and burn of Trump’s legal efforts.

“People were conned by the former president,” Lofgren told CNN. "It's clear that he intentionally misled his donors, asked them to donate to a fund that didn't exist and used the money raised for something other than what is said," she added.

A spokeswoman for Trump, Liz Harrington, dismissed the select committee’s allegations in her reply to requests for comment, saying that Trump’s "political spending is totally synchronized" with his goal of "fixing our elections," CNN stated in a report.

Trump blasted the allegations made in Monday’s hearing in a 12-page rambling statement, where he didn’t address his fundraising plans but called the select committee a “kangaroo court.”