He added to prosecutors’ portfolio
Smart law enforcement actions can domino into unsmart defendant reactions.
After the FBI released the photo of top secret documents placed on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago office carpet, Trump posted a response on social media: “The FBI took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them,” he asserted. “They dropped them, not me — Very deceiving.”
Very deceptive, he means. The word is “deceptive,” not “deceiving.”
Trump was again playing his “aggrieved martyr” card to his base — but in the process, he added to prosecutors’ portfolio against him. His own words confirm that he held sensitive national security documents at Mar-a-Lago — in “cartons,” in his desk and elsewhere.
Take note: What a subject of investigation doesn’t say when he talks can be as important as what he does say. Prosecutors will note the absence of any assertion that the FBI “planted” the evidence, as Trump had previously suggested. So there goes that defense if Trump tries to make it at a future trial.
Aha. Woman man person camera tv. “I HAD ALL THAT STUFF NICE AND TIDY IN CARTONS AND THOSE ROTTEN FBI FAR-LEFT PUNKS CAME ALONG AND DUMPED THEM ALL OVER MY UGLY CARPET.”
Trump may not understand that when a Justice Department he doesn’t control is breathing down his neck, he’s in a different world from the one he’s known. It’s not smart to play the same old cards. The ones that worked on social media won’t have the same effect in a courtroom.
But will he ever be in a courtroom or will his paid-for “judge” succeed in keeping him out of one?
From what I’ve been able to gather, Trump is a real neat/clean freak. I listened to an interview on the Bulwark with Alex Holder – director of Unprecedented. He described how he was interviewing Trump (it was either Jan 6th or very shortly thereafter) and Trump was obsessing about minutely rearranging his chair so that it was properly centered in the background. Holder said he found it extraordinary given everything else that was going on how much effort Trump put into this irrelevance. He described Trump as a very simple minded person, almost literally a man-child, but also extremely unusual and prone to rage that was literally terrifying.