The two attorneys for Donald Trump who “wrote” the letter last month requesting a meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland, James Trusty and John Rowley, were at the Department of Justice yesterday morning to try to convince prosecutors not to charge their client in the stolen classified documents case. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday morning that they met with Special Counsel Jack Smith is in charge of that, and other, Trump investigations for the DOJ.

It was bound to be an awkward meeting since the letter to Garland accused the DOJ of investigating Trump “in an outrageous and unlawful fashion.” It isn’t often that lawyers representing a client in a criminal matter begin their pre-indictment talks with prosecutors by accusing them of being the ones who broke the law.

The meeting between the Trump lawyers and prosecutors for the Office of the Special Counsel comes just two months after the federal grand jury looking into the stolen documents case heard testimony from a Trump aide who was present for the 2021 interview at Bedminster when Trump talked of having a top-secret document concerning plans for a U.S. attack on Iran. After the grand jury heard testimony from the unnamed Trump aide, a subpoena was issued for the top-secret Iran document as well as any other material in possession of the former president related to the Iran attack document, such as recordings or notes of the meeting at Bedminster.

Trump’s attorneys turned over some material to the special counsel in response to the subpoena but said that they could not find the top-secret document Trump claimed to have in his possession and was said to wave around during the interview with two ghost-writers for his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

It was the second time that lawyers for Donald Trump told the Department of Justice that they could not find certain top-secret documents that had been sought by a subpoena. The other time was in June 2022, when DOJ lawyers met at Mar-a-Lago with Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran, who turned over an envelope containing 38 top-secret documents along with an affidavit saying that the Trump lawyers couldn’t find any more classified documents than that.

An FBI search of Mar-a-Lago later that summer in August turned up over 100 classified documents the Trump attorneys, who had the run of Mar-a-Lago, couldn’t find. All of which was probably on the agenda of Monday morning’s meeting at the Office of the Special Counsel.

The FBI never sought, nor was there ever issued, a search warrant for Trump’s summer residence and office at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Defense attorneys have a phrase to describe the kind of meeting attended by Trump’s lawyers with Jack Smith’s prosecutors. They call it a hat-in-hand meeting. That’s the one where as a defense attorney you know because of stuff like missing classified documents and previous affidavits you have supplied to the DOJ that contained perjury that you have absolutely no chance of forestalling an indictment of your client, so you go hat-in-hand to those who have evidence of everything criminal your client has done and ask for leniency in the charges the prosecutors are contemplating.

Something along the lines of…you know our client, he’s always misplacing things and misremembering what happened with important documents, and we didn’t really intend to mislead you with the certification we gave you last year that we couldn’t find any more classified documents…

Maybe Trusty and Rowley were sitting there in an office at the Department of Justice shrugging their shoulders and saying, c’mon guys, how would you like to have this guy as a client! Can you give us a break?

Just imagine you’re a lawyer for a confessed criminal – yeah, I took the classified documents, because they’re mine! – and the prosecutors you’re sitting across from have followed every incriminating statement made by your client, and they have all the evidence that they had to get a search warrant to seize from your client’s club and from his own desk, and they have testimony from everyone at Mar-a-Lago from the security guys to the pool boy, and they have surveillance video tapes and audio tapes of your client bragging about having a top-secret national security document concerning an enemy of the United States.

Now try to come up with something that’s going to convince career prosecutors who have been doing this kind of thing for years that they’ve got it all wrong, that your client just accidentally took thousands of pages of government-owned documents from the White House by mistake, that he wasn’t really trying to trip them up when he got some half-wit judge in Florida to order the special master thing, that his lawyers, his other lawyers, didn’t really mean all that stuff they told the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals about illegal searches and all the rest of it.

We’re not those guys! We’re the good guys!

Look! We’ve got our hats in our hands to prove 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.

I’m going to begin this story by asking you to imagine that you are a new parent. You and your wife or husband or significant other had a baby in the hospital and took the infant home with you. You’ve done all the right physical things – you’ve got a new-fangled crib that is certified safe for infants. Nothing your baby does in that crib can cause the baby to hurt himself or herself. You’ve got all the baby blankets, and colorful mobiles your friends recommended because they worked with their babies. You’ve got baby-safe washing powder to launder clothes with, so there won’t be any harsh chemical next to the baby’s skin.

You’ve got a shelf-full of products recommended by websites, friends and family members – lotion for the baby’s skin, some kind of white ointment to prevent diaper rash, shampoo that won’t make the baby cry if it gets in its eyes. And you have diapers – tiny ones for infants that are so small they look like they wouldn’t fit a baby doll you or your sister had when you were kids, and larger sizes, too, because you’ve been told they grow faster than you can possibly imagine. You have the latest Diaper Genie, complete with extra diaper bag refills and something called “Antimicrobial Odor Control” so the things won’t stink you out of house and home.

But once you’ve unstrapped your infant from the car seat and carried your baby inside your own home, a daunting thought occurs: there aren’t any more nurses you can call on with the press of a button for help with this baby of yours. Nobody will come if your baby begins crying, and you can’t get him or her to stop. In other words, it’s all up to you from now on.

One of you is carrying the infant, still swaddled in a pink and blue striped cotton blanket from the hospital. The front door closes…and now what do you do? Where do you put the baby down? In the crib? Oh, my goodness, it looks so alone in there! Maybe we should put it on the bed. No, somebody told you not to put babies on the bed, because they might roll off. Well, you think, how about this? We can put the baby between us lying on the bed, so maybe we can watch some TV, and the baby will be safe because nothing’s going to roll over me or you!

It's all new, having a new baby – every moment of it. At first, you live in a kind of icy fear that despite everything you’ve read, everything you’ve heard, all the preparations you’ve made, you’ll do something wrong. So, the two of you tip-toe through the first days and weeks of the baby’s life, being careful about everything, so nothing terrible befalls your new child.

Now imagine this: You’ve been successful! The baby is now several months old, and you can put him or her down on a soft blanket on the living room floor or in one of those portable mesh playpens in the kitchen, so you can watch the baby as you go about your normal chores, the way, more or less, that you lived your life before you brought the baby home with you from the hospital. So now your baby is beginning to be mobile, making its first moves to crawl across the blanket or around the playpen, and it’s acting curious – reaching for things and grabbing them in its hand and examining them and usually sticking them in its mouth. The baby is changing so rapidly! It’s so cute, the way it does something new every day.

So what do you do now that your baby is approaching toddlerhood? Well, now imagine this: You’ve read a book called To Train Up a Child by two conservative Christian authors who are very influential in the world of raising Christian children and home schooling. And what does this book written by Debi and Michael Pearl tell you to do?

According to an excellent article published this week in the Washington Post, the book written by the Pearls “advocates ‘training sessions’ in which infants, as soon as they are old enough to crawl, are placed near a desired object and repeatedly struck with a switch if they disobey commands not to touch it.”

Take a minute. Have you digested it so far?

That’s not all. The Post reports that “the Pearls advocate hitting children with tree branches, belts and other 'instruments of love’ to instill obedience and recommend that toddlers who take slowly to potty training be washed outdoors with cold water from a garden hose.”

Look at the page depicted above. It’s from a handout called “Gospel-Driven Parenting” distributed by a conservative Christian group run by a minister named Chris Peeler, who is part of a larger Christian home schooling network run by a man called Gary Cox, described by the Post as “an evangelical pastor and pioneer of Maryland’s home-schooling movement.” Here’s what the handout says about beating your child: “The use of the rod is for the purpose of breaking the child’s will. One way to tell if this has happened is to see if they can look you in the eyes after being disciplined and ask for forgiveness.”

The handout does not explain how an infant who has just begun to crawl is supposed to “ask for forgiveness” after they have been beaten with a switch for the crime of reaching for a toy in a playpen.

This isn’t raising a child or even “training up” a child. It is child abuse, pure and simple, and it is a crime in all 50 states and the territories of the United States. Yet it is going on every day in this country, because there is an entire network of Christian home schoolers who have organized to insure that once parents get their children inside their homes and behind closed doors, the states can do nothing to stop them from “using the rod” to discipline and “train” their children as they are being “educated” by home schoolers.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and its leader Michael Farris have built what the Post calls “the most influential homeschool organization in the world. Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country.More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessonsabout race and gender with the politically potent language of ‘parental rights.’”

Sound familiar? Those are the “we own our children” advocates supported by Moms For Liberty who have been running, and winning, school board races across the country. They advocate laws not just allowing but mandating that the Ten Commandments be posted in every school classroom. They advocate that Christian prayer be allowed in the schools like it was in the years before the Supreme Court struck down the practice in the 1960’s. In fact, they want to bring much of the agenda being pushed by the home schooling networks run by Michael Farris and Gary Cox and Debi and Michael Pearl into public school systems everywhere.

Now imagine this Bible verse being taught in a public school: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die. You shall strike him with a rod and deliver his soul from hell.” This jewel of wisdom is from Proverbs 23: 13,14.

The Post describes the Christian home schooling movement as advocating an education teaching “Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old…in which dinosaurs were herdedaboard Noah’s ark…believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control.”

“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse, to make them invisible, to strip them of any capability of getting help. And not just in a physical way,” a woman who had been home-schooled but had left the movement told the Post. “At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.”

The Post describes the Christian home schooling movement as “a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefsthey felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a ‘Joshua Generation’ that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.”

That’s what they’re doing out in public, standing up at a school board meeting near you and demanding that this book be banned because it’s about a child with two fathers, or that book should be banned because it teaches about evolution and Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which of course goes against the Bible’s story that God made the earth and all its creatures in six days and rested on the seventh, and presumably, a few thousand years ago little children played with baby dinosaurs in their front yards instead of with dolls and toy trucks. Michael Farris, who founded the HSLDA, now works for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the non-profit that has funded lawsuits around the country seeking to infect the public sphere with conservative Christian beliefs and even laws.

But once they get those kids behind closed doors, out comes what the Washington Post describes as “the rod — interpreted by different people as a wooden spoon, dowel, belt, rubber hose or other implement.” The Post describes one man they interviewed who had been home schooled as “being struck several times a week — sometimes more, sometimes less — with what he describes as a shortened broomstickfor disobeying commands or failing to pay attention to his schoolwork,” who underwent “‘killer bee’ spankings, when the rod was used against his bare skin.”

Now imagine this: According to the Washington Post, in the state of Virginia alone 57,000 children were being home schooled in 2022, a 28 percent increase over the figures for 2019.

Somewhere on your street, or on the street behind your house, or just across town, children are being home schooled. Some of them are being taught at home by reasonable parents who only want the best for their children. But, some of them are being brought home as infants from the hospital and within a few months, their parents are hitting them with switches because they reach out for a toy or a stuffed animal. The crime of child abuse is being committed behind closed doors probably in nearly every town or city in this country in the name of a Christianity that no sane person would recognize, and there is an entire movement dedicated to the proposition that the state should pass no laws against a parent’s right to do what he or she wishes to the child they believe they own.

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.

It wasn’t the first time Donald Trump whined about General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it may be the time that will cost him. There was some interesting reporting, at least to these ears, from the New York Times yesterday on the tape that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith presented to the grand jury looking into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.

The Times reported that the tape was made during a meeting in July 2021 between Trump and two writers who were working with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on a memoir of his 10 month – wow, ten long months! – in the White House. The meeting occurred at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he spends his summers. Sources told the Times that Trump was said to refer to a classified document he had from his time in the White House that dealt with plans for an attack on Iran.

“On the recording, Mr. Trump began railing about his handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was described in media accounts at the time as having guarded against Mr. Trump’s striking Iran in the final days of the presidency, according to the people briefed on the matter,” the Times reported. “Mr. Trump then began referencing a document that he had with him, saying that it had been compiled by General Milley and was related to attacking Iran, the people briefed on the matter said.”

Wow, and wow, and double wow.

The Daily Mail printed photos of Trump boarding a private jet at the West Palm Beach Airport bound for his New Jersey golf club. Six boxes similar to those used to store Trump’s top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago were pictured being loaded onto the plane by aides. That trip happened on May 8, 2022.

On May 11, Trump was served with a subpoena for any and all classified documents he took with him from the White House and was holding at Mar-a-Lago.

On June 3, several FBI agents and two Department of Justice officials visited Mar-a-Lago, at the invitation of Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran, where they were given two things: an envelope containing 38 classified documents and an affidavit certifying that no more classified documents had been found at Mar-a-Lago after a “diligent search.”

On August 8, the FBI served a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago and discovered dozens of boxes of White House documents there, including more than 100 classified documents that had not been turned over to the DOJ in response to its subpoena at the June 3 meeting.

So, questions arise: Why was a search warrant not served on Trump’s Bedminster golf club in the summer of 2022, along with the one served on Mar-a-Lago? Could there be another trove of classified documents that Trump is still hanging onto that the DOJ has not found yet, that had been at his Bedminster golf club since the summer of 2021?

All of the reporting on the tape has referred to the fact that in discussing the classified document, Trump acknowledged that the document was classified and apparently lamented his inability to declassify it and reveal its contents to the world. The Washington Post pointed out that Trump “understood both the legal and security concerns around his possession of such restricted information.” This would undercut Trump’s claims that he had “automatically” declassified every document he had taken from the White House.

But there’s something else going on here: Why would Trump want to reveal the classified document about plans to attack Iran? Trump apparently told his interviewers that the plans had been drawn up by Gen. Milley and complained that he couldn’t reveal the document to shoot down a report that had appeared in The New Yorker that same month.

The New Yorker reported in its July 15 issue, “Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power. The chairman secretly feared that Trump would insist on launching a strike on Iranian interests that could set off a full-blown war.” The magazine reported that “Milley had, since late in 2020, been having morning phone meetings, at 8 a.m. on most days, with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in the hopes of getting the country safely through to Joe Biden’s Inauguration.”

The New Yorker reported that “Milley referred to these meetings with his staff as the ‘land the plane’ calls—as in, ‘both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck, we’re in an emergency situation. Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January.’”

It’s fairly easy to imagine how pissed Trump must have been at Milley in July 2021. Both the New Yorker and newspapers reporting on the New Yorker’s report compared the Milley story about Trump to the final days of the Nixon administration, when Henry Kissinger claimed to have worked to keep the beleaguered president from launching a nuclear strike to save his presidency.

But Trump’s grudge against Milley went back further than that. The New Yorker reminded readers that on June 1, 2020, Trump had “used the general as a prop in his infamous Lafayette Square photo op: Trump had marched through the plaza minutes after it had been violently cleared of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters, and following him was Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a pack of his White House advisers, and Milley, who was dressed in combat fatigues, as if at war inside America.”

Realizing the purpose for which he was being used when he saw press photographers ready to take the infamous photo of Trump with the upside-down Bible outside a church parish house that had been damaged by fire during Black Lives Matter protests over the murder of George Floyd, Milley turned around and walked back to the White House by himself. Several days later, Milley apologized for the role he had played in what had turned out to be a political event to benefit the reelection of Trump.

“I shouldn’t have been there,” Milley said at a graduation ceremony for the National Defense University in Washington. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

Days after Milley’s speech, Trump had him into the Oval Office and reamed him out for the apology he had issued for his appearance in Lafayette Square with Trump. He demanded to know why Milley had apologized, because apologies are “a sign of weakness,” according to an account of the meeting in the New Yorker. “’Not where I come from,’” Milley replied, as he later told associates. Milley said he had to ask for forgiveness because he was a soldier in uniform who did not belong at a political event.

‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Milley had said. ‘It’s an ethic for us, a duty.’”

I leave it to your imagination what Trump’s reaction to that must have been. During a trip to Europe, Trump infamously asked aides when he was scheduled to visit an American military cemetery in France, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The Atlantic went on to report that “in a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.”

Trump has made repeated promises at his recent rallies that he will get “retribution” on his enemies if he is elected president in 2024. Clearly, Gen. Mark Milley, who has announced that he will retire as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later this year, will be a target of Trump’s retribution campaign.

There has already been reporting that Special Counsel Smith has heard testimony that Trump retained at least some classified documents so he could show them off to visitors at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. It isn’t much of a stretch to conclude that he retained other classified documents so he could eventually use them to retaliate against people he perceived had wronged him somehow, either while he was in office, or afterwards.

Trump has long had a penchant for holding grudges and an obsession with getting back at those he believes have been somehow disloyal to him. That those qualities have now apparently put him at serious risk of indictment for withholding classified documents from the government when he was asked to return them, and then issued a subpoena for them, is such a delicious form of poetic justice, I can taste it in the back of my mouth as I write this.

...

The Trump tape story was developing last night at quite a fast pace. Although it is not known how Special Prosecutor Jack Smith came into possession of the tape, it is beginning to appear that he may have subpoenaed it from the two writers working with Mark Meadows on his White House memoir. It could also have been subpoenaed from a Trump aide who was present in the room for the interview at Trump’s Bedminster golf resort in July 2021. A reporter for the Washington Post who interviewed Trump in the spring of 2021 for a book she and another Post reporter were writing said that Trump had aides in the room recording the interview at the same time the reporters were running their own recorders.

So we now know that reporters interviewing Trump are permitted to tape record their interviews with him, and that Trump himself keeps a tape of all interviews “for fact checking purposes,” as the Post reporter explained tonight.

A former prosecutor on MSNBC also speculated tonight that the appearance of the tape made at Bedminster may be an indication that Special Prosecutor Smith has opened another line of inquiry in the investigation into the possibility that Trump had additional classified documents he had removed from either the White House or subsequently from Mar-a-Lago and taken with him for the summer of 2021 to Bedminster.

It is known that in 2022 Trump had boxes of documents moved around within Mar-a-Lago on June 2, the day before Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran invited DOJ officials to fly to Palm Beach to receive the 38 classified documents they turned over on June 3.

It looks to me at this point that there is a possibility that the “rehearsal” movement of documents Trump is said to have held before he received the subpoena from the DOJ on May 11, 2022, may have been something else altogether: the actual movement of six document boxes out of Mar-a-Lago to Trump’s private plane on May 8 when he left Florida to spend the rest of the summer in Bedminster, New Jersey.

What if the workers at Mar a Lago who described the “rehearsal” in their grand jury testimony were describing the gathering and movement of the six document boxes before May 8? The people shown in the Daily Mail photos carrying the documents from big black SUV’s across the tarmac and loading them into Trump’s airplane were not Mar a Lago workers. They were Trump aides, male and female, wearing business attire. It could be possible that Trump ordered Mar-a-Lago workers to move the document boxes for “practice” in a “rehearsal” to a certain area of Mar --Lago before May 8, and then on that date, Trump had his own personal aides move the same document boxes into the SUV’s, and from there, into the plane in which he flew to Bedminster.

There is one last wrinkle to the tape story. Trump apparently told the interviewers working for Meadows in July 2021 that he had a classified document with a plan to attack Iran that had been prepared by Gen. Mark Milley, and thus it wasn’t him who wanted to attack Iran, as the New Yorker story implied, but Gen. Milley. This characterization of the classified document containing a plan by Milley to attack Iran is bogus on at least two levels.

One, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doesn’t draw up plans of attack himself. Such memos are regularly drawn up by Pentagon officers as contingency plans, “what if” documents laying out a response if Iran explodes a nuclear weapon, for example, or attacks Israel. The Pentagon doesn’t like to be caught flat-footed if such disasters strike, so they always have a stack of responses to consider if such a thing happens.

Two, the president is periodically briefed about such contingency plans during daily intelligence briefings because as commander in chief, he would be the one to give the order to execute such a plan if and when the time came. So, what Trump probably took out of the White House in January 2021 was a top-secret document or documents containing contingency plans for Iran, Russia, China – you name it – with Milley’s name on it as the originating officer because as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley was the Pentagon official tasked as the president’s top military adviser. Of course, if Trump was briefed on a potential response to any kind of Iranian provocation or attack on an ally of the United States, the top-secret document would have Milley’s name on it. He’s the guy who provided the document to Trump as president.

Which just goes to show you that one of the things on Trump’s mind on the day he left the White House on January 20, 2021, was that he wanted ammunition to take with him to get back at those who had wronged him while he was president, Milley among them. Trump has always had an enemies list, or lists, and now we know that he had armed himself with top-secret documents to use as retribution against his enemies.

And Trump’s obsession with holding grudges has come back to bite him in the ass. What a surprise, 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.

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

This is the way CNN commemorated Memorial Day in 2015, with a story they called, “The General Who Apologized to the Dead Soldiers on Memorial Day.”

“At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, Memorial Day 1945 was an elegiac occasion. Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., who had led the U. S. Sixth Corps through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy and now commanded the Fifth Army, gave a speech that is particularly relevant for today when the trauma of our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to haunt so many vets.

"No recording or transcript of Truscott’s Memorial Day speech exists, even among his papers at the George C. Marshall Research Library in Virginia.

"In Stars and Stripes, the military’s newspaper, we have only excerpts of Truscott’s remarks. “All over the world our soldiers sleep beneath the crosses,” Stars and Stripes reported Truscott observing. 'It is a challenge to us – all allied nations– to ensure that they do not and have not died in vain.'

"Missing from the Stars and Stripes story is what Truscott did in delivering his speech. For that account we are indebted to Bill Mauldin, best known for his World War II cartoons featuring the unshaven infantrymen, Willie and Joe. Mauldin was in the audience when Truscott spoke at Nettuno, and he never forgot the day.

“There were about twenty thousand American graves. Families hadn’t started digging up the bodies and bringing them home,” Mauldin recalled years later in his 1971 memoir, The Brass Ring.

'Before the stand were spectator benches, with a number of camp chairs down front for VIPs, including several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. When Truscott spoke he turned away from the visitors and addressed himself to the corpses he had commanded here. It was the most moving gesture I ever saw. It came from a hard-boiled old man who was incapable of planned dramatics,' Mauldin wrote.

“The general’s remarks were brief and extemporaneous. He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart this is not altogether true.

“He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. . . . he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn’t see much glory in getting killed if you were in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do.”

Grandpa was a hard man. He was born in Chatfield, Texas, in 1895 and never completed the 10th grade, and at age 16 took over the teaching duties in a one-room schoolhouse in Enid, Oklahoma when the teacher died, completing the instruction of the students two years later. He enlisted in the Army and joined the Cavalry, serving at several Cavalry outposts along the borders of Texas and Arizona. He became an officer, a second lieutenant, because of his skill at playing polo. One of his commanders wanted Grandpa on his polo team, and he sent him to Officer Candidate School because only officers played polo in the Army in those days. He rose quickly to the rank of captain at Fort Bliss, Texas, because the post commander wanted Grandpa to captain his polo team in a championship match against a rival general at Fort Riley, Kansas, and you had to have the rank of captain to lead an Army polo team.

Grandpa was hand-picked by the Chief of Staff of the Army, General George C. Marshall, to go to England before the U.S. became formally involved in the war. He also sent Grandpa there to get to know the British military commanders and report back to him about their personalities, competence as leaders, and anything else he could pick up in the way of intelligence on the allies Marshall knew the U.S. Army would soon be fighting alongside. While in Great Britain, Grandpa formed and was responsible for naming the Army Rangers, and arranged with Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of combined operations for the British Commandos, to have the Rangers trained alongside British commandos at a base in Northern Ireland. Major William O. Darby, who became famous as the commander of “Darby’s Rangers,” was his deputy.

Marshall gave Grandpa his first combat command, of the Sixth Infantry Regiment, at the landing of U.S. forces on the continent of Africa at Port Lyautey, French Morocco. He went on from there to command the Third Infantry Division in the battles for Sicily and Southern Italy. He took over command of the Sixth Corps at Anzio, and was in command when the U.S. Army took Rome. He took command of the Seventh Army and led the invasion of Southwest France with the landing in Marseille and took that army all the way to Strasbourg before being sent back to Italy to command the Fifth Army. He took the surrender of the Nazi army commanded by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring on April 29, 1945, the first unconditional surrender of enemy forces in World War II.

At the end of war, after several antisemitic outbursts by General George S. Patton were reported in U.S. newspapers, General Dwight D. Eisenhower relieved Patton of command of the Third Army and turned that command over to Grandpa, appointing him Military Governor of Bavaria and putting him in charge of all the displaced person camps in southern Germany. Under Patton, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were being kept in camps in conditions not much better than they suffered in the Nazi concentration camps. Grandpa moved the Jewish survivors into housing at German army posts he seized, and arranged for a dozen Army rabbis to be sent to Bavaria to serve the survivors. Grandpa ordered that the first Passover seder in over a decade be held in Munich in April of 1946, and ordered that A Survivors Haggadah be printed by the Third Army for the occasion. This is its cover:

This is the first page of The Survivors Haggadah, another kind of memorial to the dead of another kind of war that was waged by the Nazis against Jews before and during World War II:

The Survivors Haggadah was illustrated by woodcuts made by a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. As commander of the Third Army, Grandpa held the war crimes trails in Munich for the guards and commanders of Dachau and executed many of them.

I knew Grandpa growing up as a boy and spent several summers with him and Grandma, Sara Randolph Truscott, at their home in Northern Virginia. I don’t recall seeing Grandpa smile much when I was a boy. The war, and what he did as a commander of U.S. soldiers, and what he saw during and after the war, left him a broken man. The only time he ever said anything about the war was to my father on the night before he shipped out to serve in the Korean War. They were standing at night after supper along a fence behind a farmhouse Grandpa had bought for his retirement in Loudon County, Virginia. Dad asked Grandpa what advice he could give him before he went to war. Dad told me it was the only time in his life he ever saw his father cry. Dad said that Grandpa began sobbing so hard, he had to lean with his arms over the fence in order to remain standing. Every Memorial Day, I remember his words to my father that night: “The bodies, the bodies, all those dead boys, the bodies…”

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.

Suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, impeached by the Texas House yesterday and currently awaiting trial in the Senate, has been awaiting trial on another charge for felony securities fraud since 2015. Paxton, who was elected as Attorney General in 2014, was charged the following year with conning people into investing in a technology company called Severgy without telling them that he had an interest in the company and would profit from their investments.

The charges allege that while Paxton was serving in the Texas House of Representatives in 2011, he sold $840,000 worth of stock in the company to a Florida businessman and a fellow state representative with whom he roomed while the two men served in the House in Austin. In return, Paxton received 100,000 shares in the technology company. It wasn’t a small amount of money, and the complainants in the case were upstanding members of their communities.

So, it wasn’t a case like the hundreds that would doubtlessly churn through the justice system over the eight years Paxton has been able to keep his felony charges bouncing around from court to court, county to county. You know the kind of cases I’m talking about – kids charged with stealing beer from a 7-11, or adults charged with holding up a 7-11 with a firearm; or the thousands of multiple-offender felony DWI’s that would send the perpetrators to jail during the time Paxton was under indictment.

Of course, none of those charged in 7-11 robberies or with felony DWI’s who ended up in jail were former members of the Texas legislature or the state Attorney General like Paxton was. Which is the point. There were two systems of justice in operation in Texas between 2015 and 2023: one for the ordinary citizens of the state and one for Ken Paxton, and I’ll give you one guess which justice system produced trials and convictions and jail time.

The Texas Tribune has done an excellent job over the years explaining how the Ken Paxton system of justice worked. In a 2019 story, the Tribune spent more than 15 paragraphs describing the steps the Paxton felony case went through during just the first four years of the delays Paxton and his lawyers engineered to keep the Attorney General out of court as a defendant, and Paxton himself in office.

According to the Tribune, in August of 2015, Paxton was indicted by a grand jury in Collin County. Because the case involves the state Attorney General, special prosecutors are assigned to handle the charges.

In December of that year, a Paxton friend and campaign donor sued Collin County alleging that the special prosecutors were being overpaid. That case began to make its way through the courts.

In the early months of 2016, Paxton was barred by the Texas Ethics Commission – yes, they have one of those in the Lone Star State – from raising money out of state and from using campaign funds for his defense.

Also in 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission got involved, filing civil charges against Paxton in federal court charging him with misleading investors. Paxton immediately tried to get those charges dismissed, but by mid-summer, he lost the case in an appeals court.

Paxton also filed a motion to get the felony charges dismissed. He was unsuccessful. But he was successful in raising money for his defense, more than $300,000 from political donors and “family friends,” according to financial statements seen by the Tribune.

After SEC federal civil charges were dismissed in early 2017, somehow the Collin County Commissioners voted to stop paying the special prosecutors in the Paxton case. Withholding money from the prosecution became a refrain. Later that year, a Dallas appeals court upheld not paying the special prosecutors. By the fall of 2017, not one, not two, but three delays were granted in the Paxton case, the latest one because the special prosecutors told a judge they couldn’t go to court and work for free.

The state court case filed by the special prosecutors to get paid went to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, effectively speaking, the state’s supreme court, and the Paxton trial was put off until that court could decide the special prosecutor’s case on payments.

By then it was 2018, and with all the felony charges still standing, Paxton won reelection, because Texas.

Meanwhile, the state’s highest court had ruled against the special prosecutors, who had now not been paid for more than a year. The prosecutors asked the high court to reconsider. The court took nearly a year to make up their minds to deny the prosecutor’s motion.

In 2019 Paxton filed a motion in Dallas to have the case moved back to his home county, Collin, where the county commissioners first refused to pay the special prosecutors the county had appointed to oversee the Paxton prosecution. The special prosecutors had now gone two years without being paid.

By 2020, in a complicated bouncing-around of judges and counties, the Paxton case was first sent back to Collin County, then a Houston judge sent it back to Harris County, but the case got put on hold because the judge, a guy named Robert Johnson, had to recuse himself because Paxton’s own office of the Attorney General was representing him and twenty other Harris County judges in a case against the county’s bail policies.

Later in 2020, seven employees in the office of the Attorney General reported Paxton to the FBI for conspiring with his pal, Nate Paul, to use state funds and other materials to assist Paul in real estate deals. They became whistleblowers and were fired by Paxton, setting the stage for the charges that got Paxton impeached.

But…but…but…it was only 2020! It couldn’t be over yet! In 2020 and 2021, the U.S. Attorney in West Texas where Paxton was charged and where the whistleblower charges were being investigated is an appointee of Donald Trump and William Barr, the former puppet-Attorney General. The Biden U.S. Attorney wasn’t confirmed until December of 2022, and then…wait for it…NBC News reported that the West Texas U.S. Attorney’s office recused itself, and the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. took over the case.

So the case went from Paxton’s home county, to Houston, to Dallas, back to Paxton’s home county, to the feds in West Texas to the Justice Department in Washington D.C.

Did it end there? It’s Texas, right? Of course not. The very next month, Paxton attempted to “settle” with the whistleblowers from his own office, offering them $3 million to drop their case. Then Paxton tried to get the state of Texas to pick up the bill for the entire mess he had created. He wanted the Texas taxpayers to pay off the people accusing him of running a corrupt office with a hostile environment.

Suddenly, the Texas House committee on investigations convened itself and announced this past week that it had heard “stunning testimony” about “a years long pattern of misconduct” by Paxton and voted to recommend that Paxton be impeached.

On Saturday, the Texas House took up the recommendation and voted overwhelmingly to impeach Paxton.

And so eight years and many judges and several unpaid special prosecutors later, Paxton will stand in the dock of the Texas Senate and face trial for impeachment on no less than 20 charges, many of which he had been moving around the state like chips on a checkerboard, jumping over one legal hurdle after another until even his own party, the Texas Republican Party, got tired of getting beat.

Last week, Paxton is said to have personally called members of the Texas House and threatened them with political retribution if they voted against him, and his friend Donald Trump joined him, calling those who are attempting to oust his favorite state Attorney General “liberals.”

Paxton’s own wife Angela is a state Senator and will sit in judgement at the trial of her husband. Paxton may be having second thoughts about the day he convinced his pal Nate Paul to give his mistress a job while Paul did the renovations on the house Paxton and his state Senator wife lived in.

Or maybe not. It’s Texas, folks, where anything goes unless you hold up a 7-11. In that case, you will go to court where the prosecutors will be paid to prosecute you, and you will go to jail.

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.

The Espionage Act, 18 U.S. Code § 793, is a law that was passed in 1917 just after the United States entered World War I to prevent secrets essential to the operations of the military from being transmitted to the enemy or to anyone not authorized to have them in their possession. The act, interestingly, defines secret material as “information relating to the national defense,” which in the opinion of most legal experts removes the necessity for the documents or plans or photographs or maps to have markings of “secret” or “top secret.”

Donald J. Trump, in his capacity as a citizen of the United States, is suspected of having taken such national defense information with him from the White House when he left office in 2021. The National Archives, the repository for all the papers of a president of the United States as well as gifts given to him while in office, noticed that certain documents were missing from materials turned over by the Trump administration when the Archives began to go through Trump’s papers in 2021. Among them was the so-called “perfect letter” written to Trump by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about which Trump had trumpeted endlessly as president. The letter was an official document of the Trump presidency because it was written to Trump as president during the time he served, thus it belonged to the United States and not to Trump.

Looking further through what we will call the Trump papers, the Archives noticed that certain other well known papers were missing, as well as certain gifts that had been given to Trump by leaders of foreign nations. The Archives asked for the return of all documents, gifts, and other materials Trump had taken from the White House. Thus began the long road to where we find ourselves today, contemplating charges being brought against a former president of the United States for violating a law that was written to punish spies.

The section of the law that pertains to Trump’s alleged crimes reads as if it could have been written with him specifically in mind. Here it is, section “d” of the Espionage Act:

Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it;

Here is the operative sentence at the bottom of the six sections of the Espionage Act that applies to violations of all of them: Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

I have written previously at length about all the stages of this legal journey, from the subpoena sent to Trump in May of last year, to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, to the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith to oversee all aspects of the several investigations of Trump that are underway, to the stories that have emerged about the various people who have been questioned by the grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C. hearing evidence in the case. So, we don’t need to rehash all that now.

What is relevant today are recent reports of two things that bear on the investigation of Trump for violating the act, as well as a concomitant investigation of his potential violations of laws against obstruction of justice, both of which apply to Trump’s apparent illegal theft of and retention of national security information when he left office.

The first is a report in the New York Times that the Justice Department has gathered “sufficient evidence to meet its burden of showing that the former president had retained the classified documents willfully.” One piece of that evidence recently revealed that Trump had ordered that boxes of materials, including classified documents, be moved from one place to another on the day before representatives of the Department of Justice were due to arrive at Mar-a-Lago to pick up an envelope containing 38 classified documents Trump was turning over in response to the subpoena that had been issued to him on May 11, 2022.

The date was June 2 when Trump ordered boxes to be moved within the Mar-a-Lago complex. Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, called the Department of Justice on that day and said the DOJ could come pick up the 38 documents, which FBI officers and two attorneys for the DOJ did on June 3. The DOJ officials on June 3 were shown the storage room to which boxes had been moved but were told they could not look into the boxes. Later, this fact would be used to obtain the FBI search warrant which was executed on August 8.

Corcoran has been questioned before the grand jury multiple times about these matters, including the certification he drew up that a “diligent search” had been carried out by him, and that the 38 classified documents he turned over on June 3, 2022 were all that had been found. Corcoran’s testimony, and that of a worker at Mar a Lago who was involved in moving the boxes, are apparently part of the evidence that shows Trump withheld the classified documents “willfully” in violation of the section against retaining national security information and failing to turn it over to “an officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.” That would be the DOJ officials who showed up at Mar a Lago on June 3 and were prevented from looking into the boxes they were shown in the storage room.

The other proverbial shoe to drop was testimony by another worker at Mar-a-Lago that revealed Trump had kept some of the classified documents in his office openly lying around on his desk where they could be seen by anyone who walked into the office. Special Counsel Smith also has testimony that Trump frequently showed classified documents to visitors in his office and bragged that the documents were “his.”

That piece of the prosecutorial puzzle relates to the section of the law against transmitting national security information to “any person not entitled to receive it.” Anyone Trump showed the classified documents to would fall into that category, as would any employee at Mar-a-Lago who entered Trump’s office and had access to the classified documents lying around in full view. That might be cleaners, the workers who moved the boxes of classified documents, or anyone else who walked into the office, including, for example, Mar-a-Lago visitors or Melania or Jared or Ivanka or any of Trump’s lawyers or other employees. None of them had top secret security clearances.

The point about this section of the law is that anyone to whom Trump revealed a top secret document could walk out of his office and tell someone else what he or she saw. Jared Kushner could have called his friends in the Saudi government and told them about the top secret documents Trump had about the president of France, enabling the Saudis to use that information in any oil deal they had with France, or a negotiation for France to supply the Saudis with weapons or naval vessels or military aircraft.

Trump himself could have used the top secret information in his own dealings with foreign governments and companies. The New York Times reported this week that the DOJ has issued a subpoena for information about Trump’s business dealings in seven countries: China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. Since leaving office, Trump is known to have had dealings with Saudi Arabia to use his name on a complex involving a golf course, offices, and apartments. He has also had dealings with the Saudi-owned LIV golf tour, which has signed contracts to hold its events at Trump-owned golf courses in the United States and overseas, including Great Britain.

The words hot water come to mind when describing where Trump finds himself today, and we haven’t even dipped our toe into the boiling cauldron surrounding an entirely separate investigation by the Special Prosecutor into Trump’s attempts to overturn the election of 2020, as well as an investigation into his fund raising surrounding those attempts, where he is suspected of raising funds for lawsuits filed after the election that were diverted to his own Super Pac and never used for the purpose they were advertised for in fund raising appeals. That might be a violation of laws against wire fraud, among other financial crimes.

Trump took a look at the Espionage Act while he was president and said to himself, hey, there’s a weapon I can use against my enemies in the press who keep reporting on leaks from my administration about scandals involving cabinet secretaries, among other things. Now the Espionage Act has come into play against him for its originally intended purpose.

Ironies abound. If Trump is charged with violating the Espionage Act, that will be a far cry from charges involving his Big Lie, which Republicans have fastened themselves to as if were a life preserver in the upcoming elections. Let’s see them try to call foul if Trump is, in effect, charged as a spy, especially if the charges involve him using top secret national security information to line his own grubby pockets.

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.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Russian mercenary army the Wagner Group, turned himself into Vladimir Putin’s Ron DeSantis in an online interview with a Russian military blogger that actually aired on time, unlike DeSantis’ campaign launch Wednesday night on Twitter. Prigozhin, sounding like he is at least thinking of challenging Putin’s leadership of Russia, used the interview to celebrate the Wagner Group’s extraordinarily costly victor in taking Bakhmut from Ukrainian forces last week. The portly loud-mouthed Russian billionaire even admitted that Wagner lost 20,000 of its soldiers in the nine-month campaign, although other estimates are five times that number.

Prigozhin’s interview with military blogger and pro-Kremlin political observer Konstantin Dolgov, was typically blunt, profane, and highly critical of Putin’s hand-picked military and defense leaders. He “accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff Valery Gerasimov of unprofessionalism and corruption that led to troop losses in Ukraine,” according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Prigozhin has criticized Russia’s military brass before for living in the lap of luxury in Moscow and allowing their children to drive around in expensive Mercedes Benz automobiles and vacation in the Gulf while Russian soldiers, including Prigozhin’s own Wagner Group troops, die on the battlefield. “My advice to the Russian elites — get your lads, send them to war, and when you go to the funeral, when you start burying them, people will say that now everything is fair.”

Prigozhin said that Russia’s failing war in Ukraine could drive Russians into such despair that Russia could end up going through "what happened in 1917, with a revolution — when first the soldiers rise up, and then their loved ones follow.” Prigozhin appeared to be referring to the mass defections of Russian soldiers in World War I that led to the Russian Revolution. He has been salty in his criticism of the way Putin’s pet defense officials have led the war, but never to this extent: “We are at such a point that we could fucking lose Russia -- that is the main problem. We need to impose martial law,” Prigozhin practically shouted at his interviewer. “We unfortunately must announce new waves of mobilization and put everyone who is capable to work on increasing the production of ammunition. Russia needs to live like North Korea for a few years, so to say, close the borders and work hard.”

Prigozhin bragged about his Wagner Group’s defeat of Ukrainian forces in the taking of Bakhmut, but continued to lay on his criticism of Putin’s military commanders for failing to supply his soldiers with adequate quantities of ammunition and other supplies. Coming close to being critical of Putin himself – an offense punishable by death if he had stepped an inch or over the line – Prigozhin reminded Russian listeners that the invasion in February of 2022 had been promoted as a strike to “de-Nazify” Ukraine and “demilitarize” the country.

Instead, Russia has ended up with a situation where its neighbor’s army is “one of the most powerful in the world.” As a nation, Prigozhin lamented, Ukraine has been turned into “a nation known to the entire world.”

Putin had complained for years about NATO’s push to the east, enrolling most of Russia’s former Eastern Bloc in the alliance. In a two-hour rant justifying the war two days before Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Putin claimed his seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and the coming invasion would block NATO from coming any closer to Russia’s borders.

In the interview yesterday, Prigozhin seemed unconvinced. Referring to Ukraine’s army, he bellowed, “If they, figuratively speaking, had 500 tanks at the beginning of the special operation, now they have 5,000. If they had 20,000 fighters who knew how to fight, now they have 400,000. How did we ‘demilitarize’ it? Now it turns out that we militarized it — hell knows how.”

“Hell,” in Prigozhin’s crafty verbal construction, appears to be President Putin.

Near the end of the interview, Prigozhin seemed to throw down a challenge for Russia’s military leaders such as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. He announced that his Wagner Group would be pulling out of Bakhmut to rest, replenish its severely diminished ranks with new recruits, and await the next phase of the war. His clear implication was that having taken Bakhmut for Russia, now it was the turn of Russia’s regular army to hold it.

Ukraine has vowed to take back Bakhmut, perhaps as the first move in its long-advertised spring offensive. If that happens, and Russian regular soldiers turn and run as they did last September when Ukraine re-took most of Kharkiv province, the door will be open for Prigozhin to accuse Putin’s army of “losing Bakhmut.” Prigozhin is well aware that won’t go over well in a country that has staked much of its reputation on not losing Stalingrad to the Nazis in World War II.

Prigozhin said he did not “have much faith in the optimistic scenario” that the West will tire of its support for Ukraine, setting the stage for some kind of peace deal that Putin could try to sell as a victory. He even went so far as to speculate that Ukraine’s coming offensive could succeed in driving Russian forces back to the sliver of eastern Ukraine they have held since 2014 when Putin seized Crimea and declared that Crimea and the parts of Ukraine close to the border were now Russian lands.

Hardly a master of understatement, Prigozhin was left to lament, “Most likely this scenario will not be good for us, so we need to prepare for a difficult war.”

Folks, Yevegeny Prigozhin’s interview amounts to his announcement that he’s running against Putin to become dictator-in-chief. Buckle up. The war has just spread politically from Ukraine into Russia itself.

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.

Today’s date, May 24, marks a year since an 18 year-old male, armed with an AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle, walked into the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and shot to death 19 grade-school children and three teachers. He wounded 17 others who somehow managed to survive, even though most of them had been shot and lay bleeding for over an hour before police officers finally confronted the shooter and killed him.

The grim anniversaries pile up: There was a one-year anniversary after the mass killing of 12 people and wounding of 58 more at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The mass murder of 60 concertgoers in Las Vegas, and the wounding of 413 others, had a one-year anniversary, too. So did the murders of eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where six others were wounded. Several of the victims in that shooting were survivors of the Holocaust.

There was a one-year anniversary for the mass murders of 49 patrons at the Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, during which 53 other people were wounded. The killing of 26 churchgoers and wounding of 22 more in Sutherland Springs, Texas, had a one-year anniversary, and so did the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso that killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.

The weapons used by the killers in all of these mass murders were AR-15 style semiautomatic rifles. The killer in Las Vegas used fourteen AR-15 rifles, some of them outfitted with so-called bump stocks to make them fire automatically, and ten other firearms he had bought legally in the months leading up to the massacre.

There will be an anniversary next year for the killing just two months ago of nine children and three adults at a church school in Nashville Tennessee, and another anniversary for the murder of five people in a home in Cleveland, Texas last month, and yet another anniversary for the murder of nine people at a shopping mall in Allen, Texas, just a week later.

But the one-year anniversary of the murders of schoolchildren in Uvalde stands out, because of the horror of the deaths of the innocent children and because almost nothing happened afterwards. More than 400 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting at the school on May 24 of last year. The officers, many of them wearing full combat gear, including bulletproof vests and Kevlar helmets and carrying thick bulletproof clear plastic shields, armed with fully-automatic AR-15 rifles, waited an hour and fourteen minutes before breaching the classroom and killing the shooter.

“Breaching” is an exaggeration of what actually happened. After waiting at least part of the time for a key to the schoolroom and a battering ram, the tactical force that entered the school room found that the door was unlocked and entered by turning the door handle.

Ninety of the officers responding to the shooting were from the Texas Department of Public Safety. One officer was fired. Another officer is still under investigation. A third officer resigned before a disciplinary hearing could be held. The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Colonel Steve McGraw, has not been fired, nor has he resigned. The chief of the Uvalde School District police force was fired by the county board of trustees.

The city of Uvalde attempted to block the release of public information about the shooting because it was “highly embarrassing information" that had the potential of revealing “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime,” despite the fact that none of those methods, techniques or strategies worked on May 24, 2022. There were also attempts to block the release of hallway video taken during the entire hour-and-fourteen-minute incident. Some of the video showed officers standing around chatting with one another, resting their protective shields on the ground, and fiddling with the tactical gear they were wearing. Part of one video showed an officer availing himself of hand sanitizer mounted on the wall of the school and two other officers giving each other a fist-bump before the shooter had been engaged and killed.

You would think that the state of Texas would take some steps to prevent another shooting like the one in Uvalde, but you would be wrong. A year before the killings in Uvalde, the Texas legislature passed and Gov. Greg Abbott signed a so-called “constitutional carry” bill that allows firearms to be carried without a license or training. Texas law permits the sale of AR-15 style semiautomatic rifles to persons over the age of 18. In August of 2022, just three months after the killings of the schoolchildren in Uvalde by an 18-year-old male, Gov. Abbott told the Dallas Morning News that raising the age to 21 to buy a so-called “long gun,” including the AR-15, would be “unconstitutional.”

According to the Texas Tribune, “Texas lawmakers have approved more than 100 bills that loosened regulations on firearms over the last two decades.” Some of those laws allow guns to be carried on college campuses and forbid hotels from banning handguns. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has figures that show deaths by firearms in the state of Texas have risen steeply over the past 20 years. In 1999, there were 10 deaths from firearms per 100,000 citizens. By 2021, there were 15 gun deaths per 100,000 people in Texas “Over the same period, firearm-related homicides rose 66 percent and suicides involving firearms rose 40 percent” according to the Texas Tribune.

If you have people walking into grade schools and killing schoolchildren, and people going next door and killing their neighbors because they complained that the noise of shooting a gun in the front yard was keeping their baby awake, and people driving up to shopping malls and parking their cars and getting out and shooting at crowds of people that include toddlers and young children, and you do nothing to stop it, and in fact, you double-down on rhetoric surrounding gun “freedom,” then what you get is the madness of more dead people, and then more dead people, and close on the heels of those dead people, even more of them.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day that an 18-year-old young man celebrated his freedom to walk into a gun store and buy a military-grade AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition, including 375 rounds of military-grade 5.56 mm NATO ammunition, by using that rifle and that storehouse of ammunition to kill 19 children and three teachers.

All anniversaries of deaths are sad for the family members and friends left behind. When the deaths are violent, they are doubly sad. When death comes from the barrel of a gun, the heartache is unknowable. When the deaths of innocents can be linked to laws allowing the easy purchase of weapons of war by young people who are not even old enough to buy a drink at a bar or a can of beer from a 7-11, the tragedy is ours, because the laws of this country, including its gun laws, and the legislators who make them and the governors and presidents who sign them and the Constitution which has been interpreted to allow them, belong to all of us.

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.

The jaws of a legal vise started to tighten on Donald Trump over the weekend as his former lawyer, Ty Cobb, told CNN that “the feds are coming fast” after Trump, and his former client “will go to jail” on charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

CNN also reported last week that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had handed over 16 documents to Smith’s investigators that showed Trump and his advisors had specific knowledge of the correct declassification process if Trump had wanted to make public previously secret materials. Trump has insisted that he had declassified all the documents he took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when he left office in January of 2021, a claim that has been proved false by Trump’s own statements and actions.

Trump claimed recently at the CNN so-called “town hall” in New Hampshire that the documents were declassified “automatically” when he took them from the White House because of the Presidential Records Act. The act has nothing to do with classification or declassification of documents, and rather than giving Trump permission to take documents from the White House, it sets forth the procedures for Trump or any other president must follow to turn over to the National Archives any and all records, gifts, or other materials that are in the White House at the end of a presidency.

Cobb told CNN that the NARA documents turned over to the Office of the Special Prosecutor would demolish any “legal hurdle” Trump might attempt to erect by claiming that he and his advisors didn’t know they couldn’t declassify documents with the wave of a wand, or as Trump previously claimed, “just by thinking about it.”

In other disappointing news for the former president, another of his lawyers, Evan Corcoran, turned over 50 pages of notes he took of conversations with Trump last year before the FBI searched for classified documents at Mar a Lago. According to The Guardian, Corcoran warned Trump that he could not legally retain any classified documents after Trump was subpoenaed for those documents by the Department of Justice in early May of last year. Corcoran was the lawyer who handled the putative “diligent search” for documents at Trump’s residence/club in Palm Beach, Florida after the subpoena was served.

According to the Guardian, “prosecutors have fixated on Trump’s valet Walt Nauta, after he told the Justice Department that Trump told him to move boxes out of the storage room before and after the subpoena.” A source who described the notes Corcoran turned over to prosecutor Smith told the Guardian that “the notes revealed how Trump and Nauta had unusually detailed knowledge of the botched subpoena response, including where Corcoran intended to search and not search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as when Corcoran was actually doing his search.”

Special Counsel Smith was able to obtain Corcoran’s notes when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the prosecutors could “pierce” the attorney-client privilege that existed between Trump and Corcoran because the lawyer's communications with Trump had been “in furtherance of a crime,” rather than normal attorney-client work product. Corcoran’s notes were seen by the grand jury sitting in Washington D.C. that is considering charges against Trump and others in the classified documents case.

In addition, Corcoran himself testified before the grand jury in March. According to the New York Times, Corcoran told the grand jury that he had been told that the storage room was the only place where documents taken from the White House were stored. Corcoran ended up spending several days going through more than 60 boxes of documents in the storage room as part of his “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. In June 2022, Corcoran drew up the affidavit given to the Department of Justice during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago that certified the “diligent search” had turned up only 31 classified documents, which were turned over at that time in response to the subpoena. Corcoran arranged for another Trump lawyer, Christina Bobb, to sign the affidavit he had drawn up. Bobb signed it only after a disclaimer had been added that she had not been involved in the search and had only been told that the search was “diligent.”

The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago two months later turned up more than 100 additional classified documents that were discovered in the storage room as well as in Trump’s personal office. In Corcoran’s testimony to the grand jury, he said while Trump had not misled him about where classified documents might be stored at Mar-a-Lago, the only place he suggested Corcoran should search was the storage room. Corcoran’s notes indicate that there were times during the several days he searched the storage room that the room may have been left unattended.

The Department of Justice previously subpoenaed tapes from security cameras at Mar-a-Lago that show Trump’s valet Nauta carrying boxes from the storage room. Some of the tapes had gaps, according to the Guardian, so to look into whether the tapes were doctored, the grand jury subpoenaed Matthew Calamari Sr, the Trump Organization’s security chief, and his son Matthew Jr., who succeeded him as director of corporate security for the Trump Organization. Both Calamaris have testified before the grand jury. It was also reported last week that the grand jury has heard testimony about the classified documents from a “cooperating witness” who worked at Mar-a-Lago. It is unknown who the cooperating witness is, or where he or she worked at Mar-a-Lago or what their job might have been.

In order to charge and convict Trump of obstruction of justice, prosecutors would need to prove that Trump ordered Nauta or others to move boxes containing classified documents after he had received the subpoena from the DOJ on May 11, 2022. It was not until June 3 that the DOJ sent a team of lawyers to Mar-a-Lago to pick up the envelope of 31 classified documents Trump turned over in response to the subpoena, meaning that Trump had almost a month to find the classified documents, or as Smith’s prosecutors seem to believe, move them around Mar-a-Lago so they would not be found first by Corcoran during his “diligent search,” and then by the Department of Justice when they came to pick up the proffered envelope of documents in June.

Trump’s former lawyer Cobb has his own take about why Trump likely faces indictment and conviction in the classified documents case. He told CNN that from what he knew, Smith “has a tight case” that is ready for the grand jury to issue an indictment because Trump has “lied” about the documents with such frequency since the National Archives first asked him for return of the documents way back in 2021.

Referring to what charges the DOJ is likely to bring, Cobb told CNN, “I would not necessarily expand the case to try to prove the Espionage Act piece of it because there is so much evidence of guilty knowledge on the espionage piece that all they really have to do is show that Trump moved these documents at various times when DOJ was either demanding them or actually present.” He went on to explain, “[Trump] filed falsely with the Justice Department, had his lawyers file falsely with the Justice Department, an affidavit to the effect that none existed—which was shattered by the documents that they then discovered after the search—and the many other misrepresentations that he and others have made on his behalf with regard to his possession of classified documents."

And Cobb is not the only former Trump attorney with an opinion about the case. This time it’s Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr with bad news for the former president. In an interview on CBS News, Barr told reporter Catherine Herridge, "It's very clear that he [Trump] had no business having those documents. He was given a long time to send them back and he was— they were subpoenaed. And if there's any games being played there, he's going to be very exposed."

Violation of the federal obstruction of justice statute, which appears to be the charge Smith is pursuing with the grand jury, carries a sentence of 20 years in prison.

Donald Trump had better butter up former White House aide and rabid racist Steven Miller and his Nazi pal Nick Fuentes for endorsements of his own racism and antisemitism, because Trump is going to need them when he applies for membership in the notorious prison gang. He’ll be needing to pick a place for his Aryan Brotherhood tattoo as well. An example of a tattoo that might fit on Trump’s capacious backside is pictured here:

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.