Cut a deal
Trump tried to use the documents he’d stolen to get the documents he’d failed to steal.
Late last year, as the National Archives ratcheted up the pressure on former President Donald J. Trump to return boxes of records he had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago club, he came up with an idea to resolve the looming showdown: cut a deal.
Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.
In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.
But they were all government documents, that belonged and still belong to the government, not to Donald Crime Boss Trump. You don’t get to use stolen documents as a bribe to acquire more stolen documents. Haberman and Schmidt of the Times say Trump took the documents, but it would be clearer to admit that he stole them. They weren’t his, and he’d been told they weren’t his, so his taking them was theft.
Mr. Trump’s aides never pursued the idea. But the episode is one in a series that demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had
taken[stolen], interviews and documents show.
In other words he spent a year and a half lying, making his people lie, and attempting extortion.
In the closing weeks of his presidency, the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, flagged the need for Mr. Trump to return documents that had piled up in boxes in the White House residence, according to archives officials.
“It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be,” Gary M. Stern, the top lawyer for the National Archives, told Mr. Trump’s representatives in a 2021 letter, using an abbreviation for the agency’s name.
Here’s a startling piece:
Mr. Cannon told associates that the boxes needed to be shipped back as they were, so the professional archivists could be the ones to sift through the material and set aside what they believed belonged to Mr. Trump. What is more, Mr. Cannon believed there was the possibility that the boxes could contain classified material, according to two people briefed on the discussions, and none of the staff members in Mr. Trump’s presidential office at Mar-a-Lago had proper security clearances.
Well yes but also Trump’s presidential office at Mar-a-Lago is just an office in a large resort: it’s not a secure facility. Nobody at Mar-a-Lago had proper security clearances and they all had potential access. Putin could have an agent there mowing the greens for all we know.
It was around that same time that Mr. Trump floated the idea of offering the deal to return the boxes in exchange for documents he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a “hoax” cooked up by the F.B.I. Mr. Trump did not appear to know specifically what he thought the archives had — only that there were items he wanted.
Well, you know, they’re in the box marked “Documents That Will Expose the Rushya Investigation As a Hoax.”
Mr. Trump’s aides — recognizing that such a swap would be a non-starter since the government had a clear right to the material Mr. Trump had taken from the White House and the Russia-related documents held by the archives remained marked as classified — never acted on the idea.
Aka Trump’s aides recognized the “swap” as attempted extortion via stolen material and decided not to stick their necks out quite that far.
I’ve been wondering for a while how exactly DeSantis (or anyone else) can effectively run against Trump in a GOP primary. Running as a “Never Trump” Republican is a sure recipe for a 10-20% ceiling, so that won’t work. But would DeSantis’s high approval numbers among Republican voters hold if he starts criticizing the Dear Leader? I’m highly skeptical.
The one strategy I’ve heard that might work is to basically say “I supported Trump and believe in his policies, and think he has been treated terribly by the Librul Media etc., but I will be much more effective than him.” This is an example of that.
Assume for the moment that you’re a GOP voter who believes that “Russia Russia Russia” was a hoax criminally cooked up by the Deep State and the Librul Media. Donald Trump had four years being in charge of the government, installing his preferred Attorney General, FBI director, etc., having access to classified documents. His AG appointed a special prosecutor specifically to look into this. And yet after four years, he still wasn’t able to get his hands on the documents that would totally expose this criminal hoax? His own supporters spent the last several months of his presidency yelling that he should declassify all the Russiagate documents, but somehow he didn’t get it done? His special prosecutor has accomplished essentially nothing, even after Biden and Garland left him in his position to finish his work?
You could say the same thing about the Big Lie — how could Trump “let” the Democrats steal an election? Or QAnon — there’s a widespread conspiracy that is molesting children on a massive scale, and there’s so much evidence of it that any idiot can read on the “right” message boards, and yet four years weren’t enough time for Trump to get off his ass and bring about The Storm and stop the abuse of these children?
I mean, I realize that it’s futile to expect logic to work on anyone who believes (or pretends to believe) any of this nonsense.
Turns out lawyers do have the ability to say no to Trump when the risks pertain directly to them.
… documents that *don’t exist,* by the way. There is no “Russia hoax” “smoking gun.” Except possibly the documents that prove there was no “hoax” at all, and Russia DID interfere in the 2016 election.