Washington Post: FBI believes Trump 'personally examined' boxes after Mar-A-Lago subpoena
HunterThe Washington Post is reporting new details on the Justice Department's investigation of whether Donald Trump intentionally obstructed federal efforts to retrieve classified and non-classified documents Trump was keeping in his Mar-a-Lago resort.
There's still no reported smoking gun, although some of the details are beginning to come very, very close:
All right, so there's evidence that Donald Trump personally thumbed through the boxes of government documents after receiving a subpoena demanding their return. From past reporting it has appeared that the boxes contained a hodgepodge of materials ranging from classified documents to magazine covers, and that ostensibly there's at least some material in there that Trump could argue was "his" and not the government's. We know that Trump had the boxes moved after receiving the subpoena; we know some of the boxes contained classified materials, and that a government search would later turn up a large number of classified documents Trump and his lawyers somehow (cough) couldn't find when they supposedly looked through the boxes themselves.
A smoking gun would be confirmation that Trump went through boxes that did contain classified documents, out of the "some of" them that did, saw classified documents, and kept them hidden. The Post's reporting notably doesn't say that investigators have such information.
One possible Trump defense would be "I was only looking through the boxes of government documents to see if there was anything in there that was legitimately mine and not the government's." That defense would fall apart if Trump didn't just remove that supposedly personal material, but continued to keep the remaining documents despite the subpoena demanding their return. So are investigators sure that the boxes Trump personally went through are, in fact, among those that the FBI later found inside Mar-a-Lago after Trump's lawyers insisted all government material had been returned?
There's a few other intriguing new details in the Post's new reporting. The Post reports that investigators have been asking interviewed witnesses whether "Trump showed classified documents, including maps, to political donors."
That's significant because it would build the case that Trump was keeping the classified documents for the shallowest and most narcissistic of reasons: He just wanted to show the damn things off. But the Post doesn't get any confirmation any of the witnesses said yes in response.
And this one's just odd: The Post reports that investigators are also asking witnesses specifically whether Trump "showed a particular interest in material relating to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."
Wait, what? Trump and Milley certainly had a falling out, as Milley joined the ranks of ex-Trump administration officials who exposed Trump as a frothing buffoon once they were out of his employ, but investigators have some reason to believe Donald Trump was specifically collecting government documents pertaining to Milley? The heck?
The Post's new reporting raises a lot of questions, but doesn't provide many answers. It's clear that investigators are predominantly interested in determining not whether Trump kept the government-owned materials—it is obvious that he did—but in what steps Trump took to hide the documents from the government, and possibly from his own lawyers, in violation of the subpoena demanding their return. That's the part that would be a big-boy crime, prosecutable to a much greater extent than mere sloppy document handling would normally bring.
It's pretty damn obvious that that's precisely what Trump did, but we're still not getting any hints from investigators that they think they can prove it. And proving it is the only part that matters.
