CNN goes through some of Trump’s lies about his activities:
In his speech in Georgia on Saturday, Trump mentioned a photo that was included in the indictment. The photo, which was taken at Mar-a-Lago, shows a toppled box from which papers had spilled out onto the floor.
Trump said: “I looked – it looked so orderly and nice. Somehow somebody turned over one of the boxes. Did you see that? I said, ‘I wonder who did that? Did the FBI do that?’”
Facts First: The suggestion that it’s even possible that the FBI might have turned over this box is nonsense. According to the indictment, the photo was taken in December 2021 by Trump aide and accused co-conspirator Walt Nauta, who the indictment says texted the photo to another Trump employee with the words “I opened the door and found this…” The FBI did not execute its search warrant at Mar-a-Lago until August 2022, eight months later, so it could not possibly have done the toppling.
But of course trumpians will be careful not to know that; they’ll just believe what Sackofwind tells them.
In a Friday social media post, Trump also claimed that the photo of the toppled box did not show any “documents” at all: “The Box on the floor which was opened (who opened it?) clearly shows there was no ‘documents,’ but rather newspapers, personal pictures, etc. WITCH HUNT!” He said in the speech in Georgia: “But the box that was turned over – it had newspapers, it had pictures, it had clippings, it had all sorts of things. Nobody saw any documents there.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that nobody saw any “documents” in the photo of the toppled box is false. While the photo does show newspapers and pictures among the materials that had spilled onto the Mar-a-Lago floor, the photo also clearly shows other unidentified papers in the pile – one of which prosecutors allege was classified and labeled with markings making clear it was releasable only to the members of an intelligence alliance composed of the US and four other countries.
And this is Trump’s Genius Mastermind method – he has all these boxes, see, lots of them, see, full of memorabilia from his fun time in the White House. They’re souvenirs, dammit! Not classified documents, souvenirs!
In the Georgia speech, Trump said of the 37 federal charges on which he was indicted in the documents case: “They take one charge, and they turn it into 36 charges. You saw that. Everybody was amazed. Lawyers on television … they’re not usually the best lawyers, but some are very good – they say, ‘We’ve never seen anything like it; they took one charge, and they made it 36 different times.’”
Sigh. We don’t even need to read Daniel Dale’s rebuttal. No, lawyers didn’t say that, because it would be asinine. It’s one crime committed 36 times.
Of the 37 charges in the federal indictment, 31 are for allegedly violating the same statute, against “willful retention of national defense information,” but each charge is for allegedly retaining a different classified document.
Same statute, different document. Mkay? We clear?
It’s worth noting that Trump could have conceivably faced far more than 31 charges for willfully retaining national defense information; the indictment says 102 documents with classification markings were found during the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, 38 other such documents were returned by Trump in June 2022 in response to a subpoena, and 197 more were returned by Trump in January 2022 “after months of demands” from the National Archives and Records Administration. As is also standard, prosecutors used their discretion to file charges over only some of the documents.
Be grateful, Don. It could be way worse.
Comments
18 responses to “Did the FBI do that?”
That 31 counts on the same charge would be like when you hear “4 counts of assault”, etc, I would imagine. They aren’t charging someone 4 times for the same assault, but for four assaults.
Regarding Trump’s lies, I’m reminded of two related takes.
The first is that Amanda Marcotte has been beating the drum at Salon for the proposition that by and large, Trump’s supporters are well aware that Trump’s lies are lies. They are [not] fooled or brainwashed by Fox News or whatever. They like his lies. The fact that his lies are usually transparently shameless lies is a feature, not a bug, because they know that it just pisses off liberals. They enjoy repeating those lies on Twitter or message boards or in conversations with the few remaining liberals in their lives who speak to them, because it’s fun for them. They know Trump’s running a con, they just think they’re in on it.
Relatedly, Matt Yglesias has a recent Substack post the gist of which is that conservatives are the marks in this con:
This ran in 2016 Oct, shortly before the election
Fact-free conservative media is a symptom of GOP troubles, not a cause
http://www.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-gop-trump-2016-10
Screechy, I tentatively corrected that to not fooled by Fox News, let me know if it’s wrong.
Screechy, absolutely. The more-rabid conservatives whom I know (mostly in my own family) absolutely love Trump because he “winds up the liberals”. They’re not particularly interested in any wrongdoing that he might have done or will do; the two-part point in their minds is (1) just elect the Republican, and (2) wind up the crazy liberals all you can. Law, Order, and the American Way are really only bludgeons with which to pound democrats when THEY are in power; they’re just obstacles to getting things done when republicans are in power.
(This is not true of all republicans, obviously. I know some sane ones. It’s just that the sane ones seem to be rather quiet, or in the minority, or both.)
“I didn’t do it but even if I did, it isn’t bad!”
God, only Trump could do that. Is it a bad thing that needs to be blamed on other people, or is it a fine thing to do that doesn’t incriminate you for doing it?
OB@4,
Oh, I wasn’t purporting to correct you. The exact state of mind of Trump supporters isn’t an objective fact any of us knows. And no doubt some supporters truly are misled by Fox and other “news” sources; I just suspect that it’s a lot smaller proportion than many others do.
#7 Screechy
I believe OB was referring to correcting the text of your comment at #2; see the [not] she added.
Yes that was it, sorry for unclarity. I think you accidentally left out a “not” but I’m not sure.
Holms @ 6 – yes and the dummitude of that “it looked so orderly and nice” – as if that were the whole point – stack the stolen documents tidily in boxes and put them neatly in closets where it’s a crime to put them. It’s Trump himself – giant shiny blue suit, sparkling clean, and festering rot underneath.
Oh, right, thanks! I’m extra spacey today I guess.
Aren’t we all.
Some in the gop have been defending Trump by saying he didn’t actually commit espionage, and anyway, the documents were all recovered. As the Washington Post has pointed out (here and here) the part of the Espionage Act that he’s accused of violating doesn’t say anything about spying, or passing secrets to enemies; it’s more about the intentional mishandling of classified information. And also, we don’t know if they’ve recovered all the documents he took because there’s no inventory of everything that went missing, but there is some evidence that more documents are missing.
It’s like saying “Hey, you can’t charge him with drunk driving because he didn’t hurt anyone, and besides, that car wasn’t stolen!”
Great god almighty as if all is well as long as we still have the docs.
Which raises a question – are they magicked in some way that makes them impossible to copy or even photograph? Is that even possible?
Google isn’t helping, which probably means it isn’t possible. So why didn’t Trump just copy them and return the originals? Too much trouble?
For that matter why didn’t he have the brains to remove his own surveillance cameras from the relevant locations? Mysteries proliferate.
On the thoughts of Trump voters. I have read in several places that they are not politically informed, and that many of them never voted before. I also suspect that they just want to break the government they hate, and Trump is the best for breaking that government. I don’t know whether they have any idea what the effect of breaking the government would be on their own lives, but I suspect they don’t. They tend to think the government doesn’t do anything for them. They also tend to think that the government is giving everything under the sun to people they hate – people of color, uppity women, non-Christians, etc.
OB,
Not sure, but assuming copying was physically/technologically possible, I suspect it’s some combination of:
1) Legal risk. Trump ain’t going to work a photocopier himself, so he’d have to task that out. Sending that stuff out to Kinko’s or whatever, or even having some staffer use the photocopier at Mar-a-Lago, is presumably a separate criminal offense because they’d actually see the documents, and every person who sees them is a potential informant for the DOJ.
2) Ego/control freak issues. I hear you ask, Trump apparently showed some of these documents to writers and other guests, so does he really care about legal risk? Sure — he’s happy to show them to certain hand-picked people, in exchange for getting the thrill and ego boost and whatever else he was seeking. But running that risk just to have some MAL flunky do clerical work? Eh. Remember, in the indictment there’s that text message where Nauta texts a photo of the documents being splayed out to another staffer, and they’re both rather disturbed by it. And the indictment quotes Trump’s attorney’s notes as saying that Trump doesn’t want anybody — even his attorneys — looking through “his boxes.”
3) Arrogance. Meekly handing “his” documents back to DOJ, while secretly keeping copies for himself, is a form of backing down, so he doesn’t like it. Admittedly, he was willing to lie to DOJ and say they didn’t have any more while secretly keeping some, so this can’t be a big factor.
Ohhh yes, so the indictment does quote Trump’s attorney’s notes as saying that Trump doesn’t want anybody — even his attorneys — looking through “his boxes.” Not only saying it but saying it four or five times – don’t want, really don’t, don’t want. I did notice that because of the franticness and the implications.