Trump's Present and Future possible indictments

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• The Supreme Court declined to breathe life into the Republican’s anti-democratic independent state legislature theory, deciding Moore v. Harper 6-3 in a manner that clarified state legislatures can’t shut down the popular vote. That ends Trump’s ability to use some of the scams he tried in 2020 to retake the White House even if he loses the vote in 2024. That’s a good result for avoiding the most immediate threat to democracy, even though there is some concern the justices left the door open for a future resurgence of the theory. No surprises here: Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch were the dissenters.
• Walt Nauta was a no-show at his arraignment in Miami today. His out-of-town lawyer told the judge he hadn’t been able to get a Florida lawyer to represent him, and weather-related flight delays made it impossible for him to attend in person. Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres rescheduled arraignment for July 6. Hopefully, this court is not going to get into the habit of letting the defendants delay the prosecution. You can imagine a delay well past the next election if, for instance, every time Trump fires his lawyers he is granted a pause so new counsel can get up to speed.

But the most intriguing legal developments today happened in a Manhattan courtroom, where a federal district judge, Alvin Hellerstein, took up Donald Trump’s motion to have his state criminal case tried in federal court. A state grand jury indicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records in April. At the end of Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Hellerstein said that while he would issue a final ruling in two weeks, he was leaning heavily in favor of letting the case stay in state court, as the Manhattan district attorney requested.

Judge Hellerstein said that he saw no reason that a trial in state court couldn’t provide a “measure of justice” equal to a federal proceeding. He said that while his comments weren’t his final decision, they were his “current attitudes.” The judge all but said he would order that the case should stay in state court.

There are three questions the court has to resolve in Trump’s favor before it can send the case to federal court. But today, it looked like Trump had a shot at only one of them. The issues are:

1. Whether Trump is a federal official, former or current, who can invoke the removal act;
2. Whether the crimes Trump is charged with involve acts committed under “color of office,” official acts undertaken by a president; and
3. Whether Trump can offer a legitimate federal defense to the charges against him.

(full article online)

A Good Day in Court for the Manhattan DA

Tuesday, as we discussed in The Week Ahead edition of the newsletter on Sunday, was all set to be a big day. And it was. The Supreme Court declined to breathe life into the Republican’s anti-democratic independent state legislature theory, deciding Moore v. Harper

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One of the top advisers on Donald Trump's 2024 campaign is among the individuals identified but not named by special counsel Jack Smith in his indictment against the former president for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government's efforts to retrieve them, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Susie Wiles, one of Trump's most trusted advisers leading his second reelection effort, is the individual singled out in Smith's indictment as the "PAC Representative" who Trump is alleged to have shown a classified map to in August or September of 2021, sources said.

Trump, in the indictment, is alleged to have shown the classified map of an unidentified country to Wiles while discussing a military operation that Trump said "was not going well," while adding that he "should not be showing the map" to her and "not to get too close."


(full article online)

Top Trump campaign aide identified as key individual in classified docs indictment: Sources

Susie Wiles, a top adviser on Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, is among the individuals identified in the classified documents indictment against him, sources tell ABC News.

abcnews.go.com

 

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However, that conversation isn’t alone. There’s a second such conversation documented in the indictment. It also took place at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It also involved classified defense documents. What’s provided about that conversation is much less detailed, but it may be worse in terms of its threat to national security than the conversation captured on tape. Because in this second instance, Trump was talking about an active, ongoing military operation, and he was spilling this information to a Republican elections operative with hundreds of connections and a reputation for leaking.


That conversation is described in a single paragraph in section 35 of the indictment.

In August or September 2021, when he was no longer president, TRUMP met in his office at The Bedminster Club with a representative of his political action committee (the “PAC Representative”). During the meeting, TRUMP commented that an ongoing military operation in Country B was not going well. TRUMP showed the PAC Representative a classified map of Country B and told the PAC Representative that he should not be showing the map to the PAC Representative and to not get too close. The PAC Representative did not have a security clearance or any need-to-know classified information about the military operation.

Like the first conversation, Trump once again makes clear that the information he is showing is classified and that he shouldn’t be showing it to anyone. He even recognizes that the PAC representative doesn’t have a security clearance or any justification for seeing the sensitive military information. Even if the first conversation didn’t exist, this alone would be enough to check every box on a federal indictment.

However, there’s reason to believe this conversion is even worse than the one that’s gotten so much attention, because in this case the information Trump is showing off describes an “ongoing military operation.”

From the information provided, it’s not possible to determine exactly what operation that might be, but there is one obvious candidate: the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.


(full article online)

The Trump indictment detail nobody’s talking about

The conversation detailed on page 16 of the federal indictment against Donald Trump is so compelling that there’s little wonder it has garnered a huge amount of attention from the press and public. In that conversation, not only does Trump reveal that...

www.dailykos.com

 

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A former top Trump White House spokesperson has said that the former president “never” showed any sign of understanding the meaning of classification or other methods used to protect national defence secretsduring his time in office.

Stephanie Grisham served as Donald Trump’s press secretary and communications director and was also the top spokesperson and chief of staff to former first lady Melania Trump.

Ms Grisham, who has become a fervent critic of her former boss, appeared on MSNBC on Sunday to discuss the former president’s legal situation following his indictment on federal charges over his alleged unlawful retention of national defence information and obstruction of justice.

She said that Mr Trump never exhibited any reverence for how the nation protects important information.

Asked about a report indicating that a top Trump campaign aide, Susie Wiles, has been speaking to prosecutors and could be a witness against Mr Trump, Ms Grisham said she regularly saw him disregard best practices for handling sensitive documents and classified information, including at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach mansion turned private club where he spent winter weekends as president before making it his primary home post-White House.

“I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio,” she said.

“He has no respect for classified information [and] never did.”

The ex-White House spokesperson may have been referring to a now-infamous incident that took place when the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe visited Mr Trump at his Florida property.


(full article online)

Ex-Trump spokesperson says she saw him show off documents on Mar-a-Lago dining patio

Stephanie Grisham said she saw Mr Trump show classified documents to people ‘on the dining room patio’ at Mar-a-Lago

www.independent.co.uk

 

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Part 1

On Wednesday, Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart denied a request from several news organizations to release the entire affidavit DOJ submitted in support of its request to search Mar-a-Lago last August. But the judge did order DOJ to release a slightly less redacted version.

Here’s my favorite page in the less redacted version:



In this screen capture and others, the newly unredacted portions of the affidavit are in yellow highlight
Yes, Trump kept the classified material he walked out of the White House with in boxes. But what more is there behind the ominous black bars? How much stronger is the government’s evidence than what is publicly known? Was national security endangered more than the allegations in the indictment suggest? Are there as of yet publicly unidentified cooperating witnesses? There is no telling what’s behind all of those black bars.

There is a lot that’s still redacted, with intriguing glimpses like the one above into what the government shared with the judge. The government can’t just redact on a whim. It has to show its redactions are narrowly tailored to serve legitimate interests and are the least onerous alternative to sealing the entire affidavit. Here, the judge ruled that the government was entitled to redact portions of the affidavit to "comply with grand jury secrecy rules and to protect investigative sources and methods," which means there is almost certainly some very interesting information still hidden. But we did learn a little bit more in the newly unredacted bits. A lot of it has to do with the allegations about the different ways Trump and his co-defendant, valet Walt Nauta, tried to keep the classified information stored at Mar-a-Lago from coming to light. None of this is groundbreaking, but it does put some interesting flesh on the already meaty bones of the case.

The newly available portions of the affidavit confirm that DOJ became concerned there was more going on than just sloppiness or negligence on Trump’s part after they obtained security camera video from Mar-a-Lago. The video showed Nauta removing boxes from the storage area where Trump acknowledged he’d kept classified documents. The videos, which are mentioned in the indictment, showed that just ahead of a visit to Mar-a-Lago from DOJ officials to take possession of any remaining classified material there pursuant to a subpoena, Nauta removed 64 boxes from the storage area and placed them in various locations within Trump’s residence area. But he returned only 30 boxes. DOJ did the math.

Newly Unredacted Parts of the Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant

On Wednesday, Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart denied a request from several news organizations to release the entire affidavit DOJ submitted in support of its request to search Mar-a-Lago last August. But the judge did order DOJ to release a slightly less redacted version.

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Part 2

"[T]he current location of the boxes that were removed from the STORAGE ROOM area but not returned to is unknown," prosecutors told the court.

Why did the FBI, as reported, hesitate and even push back against getting a search warrant here? Had this been any other case with evidence of this nature not only meriting a search but mandating that one be done to protect national security, it’s difficult to envision that they would not have been the leading force.

Despite what the government knew about the missing boxes, Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran told DOJ "he was advised" all White House records were in the storage room, and "he was not advised" any records were in any of the private spaces where they were ultimately found when DOJ conducted its search. The use of the passive voice here is notable. It theoretically possible someone like Nauta conveyed this information to Corcoran, but in a matter like this, it’s highly unlikely that the lawyer would take the word of anyone other than his client, Donald Trump. Prosecutors most certainly asked Corcoran who told him this when he testified in front of the grand jury in March under a court order.



This is why Judge Beryl Howell, in the District of Columbia, permitted prosecutors to pierce the attorney–client privilege with the crime fraud exception. While it’s possible that Corcoran was under notice from other sources that Trump had lied to him, the logical conclusion here seems to be that Trump was using the lawyers and the legal advice they gave him about how the subpoena process would work to conceal his crimes. One of the mysteries of the case is why any lawyer would remain in Trump’s employment, knowing that his client couldn’t be trusted to tell him the truth.

Some of the newly unredacted info confirms that the FBI and DOJ knew that “classified information was possessed in other areas of” Mar-a-Lago. It’s one thing to know boxes are missing. But this goes a step further, confirming that before the search warrant was obtained, the government knew there was classified information elsewhere at Mar-a-Lago. But how did they know it? It seems likely that there were cooperating witnesses involved. Again, the black bars prevent us from knowing the “sources and methods” of the government’s information. But it seems clear there are additional witnesses involved, perhaps employees of the club or perhaps people who had been in Trump’s offices or other parts of the residence.



A sentence that was previously redacted at the end of paragraph 58 of the affidavit provided some interesting information. “Multiple documents also contained what appears to be FPOTUS’s handwritten notes.” This means Trump won’t be able to claim he never saw the documents—at best he could maintain the notes were written while he was in office. But if he resorts to that argument, he still has to explain how the documents ended up at Mar-a-Lago after they were in his hands.



All in all, it’s not a lot of new information, but we’re seeing the depth in the government’s case and learning more about its strength. Perhaps most importantly, the release of these interesting pieces of information underscores just how much more there is that we don’t know. With the former president’s team beginning to get access to discovery, he’s in the process of learning just how strong it is. That may explain why we see him acting out even more than usual on social media.

On June 29, just hours after Trump posted President Obama’s Washington, D.C. address on Truth Social, one of Trump’s followers, Taylor Taranto, predictably picked up the gauntlet. He was arrested by the Secret Service in the neighborhood after livestreaming that he was looking for a way in. Taranto also faces misdemeanor charges in connection with January 6. His defense lawyers suggested during his detention hearing on those charges that prosecutors intend to bring felony charges in connection with the incident involving Obama. Taranto had two 9mm weapons, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a machete in his vehicle at the time of his arrest. An additional 18 firearms registered to Taranto were unaccounted for, and after he was arrested, information on his social media accounts was deleted, suggesting a possible accomplice.



Trump knows that when he speaks, his followers listen. That’s how the country ended up on the verge of chaos on January 6. Did he think some sort of payback was due to Obama as he learned more about the government’s case against him? Or was it a childish but highly dangerous temper tantrum? Trump’s followers are now harassing and threatening agents and prosecutors working on cases against him. The risk of someone being seriously harmed to salve the former president’s mounting insecurities is untenable. Trump’s behavior is unacceptable. And yet delay is already creeping into the Mar-a-Lago prosecution. Walt Nauta was only just arraigned Thursday, three weeks after Trump, on the thin veneer of an excuse that he couldn’t find a Florida lawyer to represent him.

Trump is increasingly a danger to the community, and courts and prosecutors would do well to treat him like one. He’s cornered. And there’s no telling what he won’t stoop to to try and save himself, or just to vent his anger.

Newly Unredacted Parts of the Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant

On Wednesday, Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart denied a request from several news organizations to release the entire affidavit DOJ submitted in support of its request to search Mar-a-Lago last August. But the judge did order DOJ to release a slightly less redacted version.

joycevance.substack.com

 

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