Trump 57: Stealing Nuclear Documents And Pleading The Fifth

[formergothardite]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

He's getting more unhinged:

 

It sounds like Trump is in full on panic mode. I wonder if he had taken payment for some of those documents but hadn't delivered them yet and now he has some real nasty people breathing down his neck. Which is why he asked them to be returned so he could hand them over to the national archives. And now he wants to be made president immediately which is pretty much the only way he would get access to the documents again. 

Trump is in way over his head. His normal tactics aren't going to work. 

[Xan]

There's a good opinion piece over on Raw Story concerning how criminal and far-reaching this coup really was.  The writer, Thom Hartmann, thinks we were headed into a strongman oligarchy that would align with Russian, China, and Saudi Arabia.  Donny had already gotten his people into control positions in a lot of areas.  The classified documents were probably what he was keeping and doling out to those countries' leaders, as requested.

Spoiler

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-seditious-conspiracy-2657964597/

 

[47of74]

Just out of curiosity what do you all think would happen if the FBI parked outside wherever he was staying and turned on a WI-FI network called FBI Surveillance Van?  I’m thinking of orange fuck face panicking and doing something even dumber. 

[Alisamer]

3 hours ago, formergothardite said:

It sounds like Trump is in full on panic mode. I wonder if he had taken payment for some of those documents but hadn't delivered them yet and now he has some real nasty people breathing down his neck.

That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing IMO. The wheels of justice turn really slowly, but the goons who work for the powerful and criminal are much faster. I'd prefer to see Trump arrested and properly prosecuted for his crimes, but I'm not going to be super upset if he just suddenly mysteriously "disappears" either. Could be him running from the law, could be something sinister, I don't care. Just as long as he's not stirring up another coup and being an active risk to democracy. I do think he's put himself in a bad position. Never a good idea to risk pissing off Putin and the guy with the bone saw.

8 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Just out of curiosity what do you all think would happen if the FBI parked outside wherever he was staying and turned on a WI-FI network called FBI Surveillance Van?  I’m thinking of orange fuck face panicking and doing something even dumber. 

Doesn't even have to bhe the FBI, TBH. It could be anyone driving by who stops and sets up a hot spot for a moment. 

[Xan]

2 hours ago, Alisamer said:

That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing IMO. The wheels of justice turn really slowly, but the goons who work for the powerful and criminal are much faster. I'd prefer to see Trump arrested and properly prosecuted for his crimes, but I'm not going to be super upset if he just suddenly mysteriously "disappears" either.

I'm just afraid that he's not going to disappear.  If anything, he's ramping up.  He'd much rather take down the whole country than be found guilty.  And I think he's got the support of the Saudis and Russia -- although Putin is at a weak point now.  China will play the long game and just watch on the sidelines.  I don't imagine that the Saudis are very happy with our new concentration on electric vehicles.  Without their oil fields, they'll be lost but it will be a long time coming.

Edited August 30, 2022 by Xan

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an excellent analysis about why "butter emails" is completely different from the Mar-a-Loco document fiasco: "What about Clinton’s emails? How Trump’s document controversy differs."

Quote

The debate over what is to be done with Donald Trump and his alleged mishandling of sensitive government documents has landed in the zone where it was inevitably headed:whataboutism. Hillary Clinton escaped prosecution for using a private email server as secretary of state in 2016, the right argues, so why should Trump ever be indicted?

In this case, we use “whataboutism” non-judgmentally. Indeed, it might be fitting and instructive to compare the two situations, especially given that their central figures occupy similar positions in our national politics — as de facto figureheads of their parties, who had access to highly sensitive information. A core principle of our justice system, after all, is that the law be applied equally.

But that doesn’t mean the two situations are the same or even particularly similar. Even as our understanding of why the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago earlier this month remains incomplete, some key differences have already emerged.

And applying the Clinton standard might not augur as well for Trump as proponents seem to believe.

As the situation has deteriorated for Trump, his allies and other conservatives have increasingly called for that standard. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) has suggestively warned there would be “riots” if Trump is charged with mishandling sensitive information after “Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement.” Trump lawyer Jim Trusty said Monday on Fox News that he disagreed with how the Clinton standard was utilized back in 2016, saying it “may not have been the most respectful precedent” — “but I’ll take it in terms of the result.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, meanwhile, argued this weekend that if Garland can’t prove Trump’s conduct was worse than Clinton’s, then “the better judgment is not to prosecute and put the country through the trauma of a political trial that half of America will suspect is a case of unequal justice.”

But just how similar are the two situations? It’s worth parsing, using the actual Clinton standard set forth by then-FBI Director James B. Comey in July 2016.

In explaining his agency’s recommendation not to prosecute, Comey cited the lack of four elements he said had been present “in some combination” in previous prosecutions involving removal or mishandling of classified information:

1. “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information”
2. “vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct”
3. “indications of disloyalty to the United States”
4. “efforts to obstruct justice”

Comey concluded: “We do not see those things here.” Thus, Clinton was not charged.

Let’s take them one by one and compare the evidence against Clinton and Trump.

1. “Clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information”

This was the portion of Comey’s decision that was most disputed in Clinton’s case.

The applicable law, the Espionage Act, states that it is a crime to remove national defense information from its “proper place of custody” through “gross negligence.” But Comey indicated Clinton’s alleged misconduct had to be “clearly intentional and willful” to bring a prosecution — a standard many critics at the time complained was higher than “gross negligence” because it required intent. Comeyeven said in the same news conference that Clinton had been “extremely careless,” which sounds a lot like “grossly negligent.”

But if we’re arguing about applying the Clinton standard, “clearly intentional and willful mishandling” is that standard.

Comey said Clinton and others should have known better than to potentially expose this information on a private server, but “we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information.”

He said at a hearing two days later that there was insufficient proof that Clinton intended to obscure her emails. “Our best information is that she set it up as a matter of convenience,” he said, echoing Clinton’s own justification. But there were reasons to doubt the arrangement arose strictly out of convenience, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker found, citing the holes in Clinton’s various explanations.

Given the disputes over Comey’s read on Clinton’s intent, it’s difficult to directly compare to Trump. But a key difference is that there is lots of evidence Trump resisted relinquishing these documents when the government repeatedly came knocking for them.

As The Post reported last week in a thorough review of the known facts:

In a legal filing on Monday, Trump’s lawyers insisted that he had been cooperating with Justice Department requests. In fact, however, the narrative they laid out, as well as other documents and interviews, show that Trump ignored multiple opportunities to quietly resolve the FBI concerns by handing over all classified material in his possession — including a grand jury subpoena that Trump’s team accepted May 11. Again and again, he reacted with a familiar mix of obstinance and outrage, causing some in his orbit to fear he was essentially daring the FBI to come after him.

With Clinton, the question was: Did her reasons for setting up the private email server demonstate her intent? With Trump, we’re still learning a lot. But there appears to be plenty of evidence to suggest his intent was to keep these documents, even when the alleged mishandling was flagged to him.

Indeed, it’s becoming clear that Trump’s obstinance played a role in why he was searched. Whether that search was justified or not, it’s not really analogous to Clinton.

2. “Vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct”

“Vast quantities” is, of course, a subjective term. But the quantities do differ somewhat in these two situations.

With Clinton, Comey said 113 emails were found to have contained classified information, including eight email chains that had information marked top secret at the time they were sent. (Many didn’t include classification markings at the time, because they were not official government documents.)

With Trump, we still don’t know the full extent of what he took to Mar-a-Lago. But the search warrant affidavit released last week said that Trump in January voluntarily returned 184 classified documents, including 25 that were marked top secret. The search earlier this month turned up 11 more sets of classified documents, including several that were top secret.

We don’t have the final numbers — the New York Times last week put the total number of classified documents at more than 300 — but the government has retrieved more classified and top secret documents from him than from Clinton.

From there, the question is whether the number of documents is considered “vast” and “exposed” enough to “to support an inference of intentional misconduct.”

(It’s also worth reiterating that, despite Trump’s claim that he declassified these documents, there is still no evidence that he actually did, and the laws the government has cited don’t require the documents to be classified for a violation to occur.)

3. “Indications of disloyalty to the United States”

There is no evidence that Clinton sought to obscure the information out of disloyalty to her country. Even if you think Comey too readily accepted her explanation of convenience, the most readily available alternate explanation is that she didn’t want these records to be obtainable because they could harm her political career. That’s not the same as disloyalty.

With Trump, the evidence on this front is very incomplete — and “disloyalty to the United States” is a very high bar. We do know that there was urgency to retrieve the documents for some reason, but despite plenty of speculation, we don’t know why that was.

4. “Efforts to obstruct justice”

This is likely to be the crucial difference, possibly alongside No. 1, if Trump is ever charged.

As mentioned earlier, Trump resisted returning these documents. He didn’t return them even after one of his lawyers agreed last year that they should be returned. His lawyer also signed a document in June stating that all documents marked as classified had been returned, according to the Times. And the government cited the likelihood that it would find evidence of obstruction to obtain the search warrant.

Precisely what the government believes might rise to the level of obstruction, we’ll have to see.

As for Clinton, she testified to Congress about her private email server as part of the Benghazi hearings. She sat with the FBI in a voluntary interview for more than three hours. She also turned over tens of thousands of emails.

Her critics, including Trump, have long suggested she engaged in a coverup by virtue of her and her team deleting many other emails and destroying phones. Comey said Clinton’s team turned over 30,000 emails deemed to be work-related after sorting through the documents using headers and word searches, rather than reviewing each one individually. This has long been used to suggest the effort was nefarious — often using hyperbolic language involving bleach and acid — but there’s no evidence it was. (And there are legitimate reasons to do these things.)

On this point, Comey was firm. He said that Clinton might have deleted some emails that were work-related — and that emails recovered through other means confirmed that — but that there was no evidence of a deliberate coverup.

“I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them,” he said.

He added later: “Although we do not have complete visibility because we are not able to fully reconstruct the electronic record of that sorting, we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort.”

The evidence of obstruction, in other words — just wasn’t there in Comey’s estimation. We’ll find out whether the Justice Department determines it is in Trump’s case, and if so, how compelling it is.

 

[47of74]

Google’s had enough of Herr Orange’s bullshit

Quote

Truth Social, the would-be Twitter competitor created by Trump Media and Technology Group, remains unavailable on the Google Play store.

Google said the app lacks effective systems for moderating user-generated content, which violates the store’s terms of service.

“On Aug. 19, we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play,” the tech company, which is owned by Alphabet, told CNBC in a statement Tuesday.

The restriction means that Android users, who make up 44% of smartphone users in the U.S., can’t download the app. Google will not let the app go live until the content issues are addressed. Truth Social acknowledged Google’s concerns and said it would work on addressing these issues, according to Axios.

 

And little baby fuck face posted to his onlinebund meeting about 60 times today

Quote

Former President Donald Trump spent Tuesday morning feverishly sharing content from supporters on his social media platform Truth Social, posting or re-posting more than 60 times since early Tuesday morning, including content from QAnon accounts and the far-right message board 4chan. 

 

[libgirl2]

2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Google’s had enough of Herr Orange’s bullshit

 

And little baby fuck face posted to his onlinebund meeting about 60 times today

 

I honestly think he wants to see a bloody revolution in the streets. 

[bea]

I honestly think he wants to see a bloody revolution in the streets. 

The god-emperor’s followers are sitting in front of Fox, jerking off furiously to the idea of getting to attack the “librulls.”

[libgirl2]

4 minutes ago, bea said:

The god-emperor’s followers are sitting in front of Fox, jerking off furiously to the idea of getting to attack the “librulls.”

Yea, they are. An don't forget executing the FBI as a sacrifice to their god. 

[GreyhoundFan]

[libgirl2]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I will be sure to ask satan, I mean Santa for it. 

Sure prick, supply chain issue. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Settling scores or telling truths? Trump-era memoirs reveal covid chaos."

Quote

In his memoir published last week, former White House adviser Jared Kushner confesses that he lost faith in then-U.S. health and human services secretary Alex Azar as coronavirus cases climbed in March 2020 — and Trump officials discovered many hospitals lacked key supplies to fight the virus.

“I couldn’t bring myself to look at Azar. I was livid that the secretary had not done more to prevent the shortage” of ventilators, Kushner writes in “Breaking History.” The president’s son-in-law details his efforts to shift control of the pandemic response from Azar to leaders of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and says it was “the best decision we could have made.”

In her own memoir, former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway reveals how former president Donald Trump shrugged off her warnings about a virus just beginning to creep across the United States. “ ‘Mr. President,’ I said. ‘I’m worried about the coronavirus,’ ” Conway writes in “Here’s The Deal,” recounting a private moment with Trump in the presidential limousine on Feb. 6, 2020. “ ‘I’m not,’ ” she recalls him replying. ‘The doctors told us there is a very low risk for the United States.’ ” Conway says she quickly regretted her “emotional” outburst and tried not to bring up the threat again for several days.

And in “Silent Invasion,” former covid response coordinator Deborah Birx revisits a day in early April 2020 when Trump turned on her, convinced she had misled him about the virus’s severity. “ ‘We will never shut down the country again. Never,’ ” she relates Trump telling her, before striding out to lead another covid news briefing. It was the effective end of Birx’s influence on the president, she writes, just five weeks after she assumed the role.

More than a dozen former Trump officials have written books that attempt to influence how history will judge the administration’s pandemic response — and not incidentally, their own roles in it. The book covers and blurbs promise revelations about a crisis that quickly swamped the country, shaped the 2020 election and continues to reverberate more than two years later.

But across more than 4,000 pages of memoirs reviewed by The Washington Post — from tell-alls by senior health leaders to lesser-known books, such as an October 2021 memoir by former national security official Keith Kellogg — the picture that emerges is of an administration uniquely unsuited to meet the demands of a pandemic. While Kushner, Conway, Birx and others serve up different slices of shared history, their memoirs collectively reveal a White House where top appointees and career scientists were forced to jockey for influence with a mercurial leader — an indictment of Trump and his feuding deputies, written by some of the people who shared the room with them.

Several claims have made news or shaped congressional investigations. In “The Chief’s Chief,” published last year, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed that Trump had secretly tested positive for covid on Sept. 26, 2020, three days before a presidential debate, altering the timeline for an infection that was not publicly disclosed until Oct. 2, 2020, and extending the long list of people Trump may have exposed before landing in the hospital himself. Memoirs from former officials such as Scott Atlas and Peter Navarro provided fodder for a House panel probing whether those officials interfered with career government workers’ efforts to fight the virus.

“Your recent book provides abundant detail about your time working in the White House,” House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) wrote Navarro last December, saying the former trade official must comply with a subpoena and turn over the documents he details in his memoir.

In interviews, multiple authors claimed they’re writing for history — and not to salvage their own reputations or to savage others’.

“Because I was writing my own book, I purposely didn’t read anybody else’s,” Birx told The Post in a June interview, saying she drew on hundreds of pages of real-time notes and “1,000 emails” from her time inside the administration. “It’s important to write a book from documentation rather than people’s perceptions,” she said. “I treated this like you would a laboratory experiment …. it all comes back to data and results.”

Others note the self-serving nature of former colleagues’ efforts, but not their own. “What I see now mostly is political scapegoating and blaming,” Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing coordinator, wrote in an email. Giroir’s book, which is set to be published early next year, will focus not just on the response to covid, but on the steps he argues are necessary to prepare for the next disease outbreak. “My book is VERY different” than the others, Giroir wrote.

The harshest criticism of all comes from outsiders who argue that officials’ candor is too little, too late amid a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans.

“This is my first call to ban a book,” Sheila Kaplan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the government’s coronavirus response, wrote on Twitter as Birx’s book was announced. “When Birx was in office, she hung up on me when I called from NYT to ask what was happening. At this point, who cares what she has to say?”

New revelations

The books do offer a window on history through conversations and moments that only senior officials witnessed. Conway writes that she pitched Trump on March 12, 2020 — the day after his rocky Oval Office address, calling for a European travel ban — about enlisting former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in the government’s pandemic response. In Conway’s eyes, the plan would have demonstrated that fighting the coronavirus transcended politics.

“Looking at Trump across the Resolute Desk, I could picture all five presidents standing there, lending their support to him as he tackled this ‘once in a century’ pandemic,” Conway writes. “Trump declined.”

Almost a year later, those other presidents would release public service advertisements encouraging all Americans to get vaccinated — an ad campaign that Birx details in her book, even as Trump sat out the joint effort.

In her book, Birx also reveals her worries that the Trump administration was failing to share public health data with its Democratic rivals in 2020. She reveals that she spent months back-channeling with a key Biden adviser, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler, who was “worried about an Election Day vaccine development surprise” that could help sway undecided voters.

The memoirs also offer a guide to the political rivalries in Trump’s orbit, detailing in firsthand accounts how Birx lost favor with the president, while Atlas, a Stanford radiologist with no prior pandemic expertise, quickly won it.

Birx, a career civil servant, repeatedly likens her efforts to a chess match, suggesting she sometimes concealed her long-term goals with Trump in hopes of winning short-term policy victories. “I couldn’t do anything that would reveal my true intention — to use the travel ban as one brick in the construction of a larger wall of protective measures we needed to enact very soon,” she writes of a March 11 meeting where she successfully advocated for limiting travel from Europe.

But as others presented hopeful — if deeply misleading — data that minimized the virus’ risks, the president and his deputies grew convinced that the White House coronavirus coordinator had overstated the pandemic threat and deliberately misled him. Increasingly, they turned to figures like Atlas, whose minimalist approach to responding to the pandemic aligned with Trump’s as the president sought reelection.

For instance, Birx details how Atlas predicted covid would lead to no more than 10,000 deaths when he first contacted a senior Trump official in March 2020. (Birx’s disclosure prompted the House committee probing the coronavirus response to publicly release that Atlas email exchange.) At the time, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci and Birx were projecting 100,000 to 200,000 deaths in the best-case scenario for the U.S. if everyone followed recommendations to curb the virus.

In his own book, Atlas reveals his first contribution after joining the administration in July 2020 was to soften a planned Trump tweet, which would have encouraged “everyone” to wear masks to protect against covid. Atlas changed it to stress the value of wearing masks only in crowded places, where social distancing was not possible.

Even books that only peripherally deal with the virus offer new insights into the administration’s response, as well as its rivalries and regrets.

William P. Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, details in “One Damn Thing After Another” how he pleaded with the president and other senior officials to cut back on Trump’s covid press briefings, worried that his extemporaneous riffs were backfiring.

“Mark, he is just blowing it,” Barr says he told Meadows in spring 2020. “The more he runs off at the mouth, the more erratic and out of control he seems.” Days later, Trump would infamously extol the possibility of using light or bleach to fight the virus, leading to public outrage and halting the briefings for months.

Defending the response

Multiple books delve into the administration’s efforts to accelerate the development of coronavirus vaccines through Operation Warp Speed — a subject closely explored in former health official Paul Mango’s book, “Warp Speed.”

The technocratic tell-all details the strategic, manufacturing and financing processes that delivered the shots within a year — an unprecedented achievement — with recommendations on how to replicate similar projects. But the narrower story also minimizes the human dramas depicted in other books and contemporaneous reporting, such as overlooking Trump’s well-chronicled anger that the vaccines weren’t finalized before Election Day on Nov. 3. For instance, Mango says that Trump delivered just one message in a Nov. 9 Oval Office meeting after Pfizer reported its vaccine was safe and effective. “ ‘Get it out as quickly as possible. Americans are dying,’ ” the president reportedly told Mango and other officials.

(The following day, Trump would publicly accuse Pfizer of deliberately waiting to release its vaccine data until after the election.)

But all of the authors spend time apportioning blame for a response that stumbled across 2020, with delays in procuring testing and supplies, and conflicting messages to Americans about what they should do to protect themselves. Many fault a government bureaucracy that they say was too slow to address the fast-spreading outbreak. Birx writes at length about persistent data problems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that she says necessitated a major overhaul, even as media headlines suggested she was undercutting the agency by contracting out its data collection.

“In many ways, anti-Trump sentiment has prevented people from seeing the full spectrum of the breakdown at the CDC in the pandemic’s early months and that continues today and still needs to be addressed,” she writes.

Other former Trump aides try to pin the president’s most unpopular pandemic decisions on officials like Birx and Fauci — an attempt to absolve Trump of blame for government restrictions that some conservative voters say went too far.

“The president had no choice but to trust them,” Meadows writes of Birx and Fauci, contending that the projections by the infectious-disease experts led to unnecessarily harsh shutdowns in early 2020. (Public health experts have largely hailed Birx and Fauci for their advocacy of social distancing and other measures to curb the virus’ spread.)

Atlas similarly faults the “Birx-Fauci lockdowns” for harming the economy, students’ education and Americans’ mental health — but goes further than his former colleagues to criticize Trump for empowering them.

“On this highly important criterion of presidential management — taking responsibility to fully take charge of policy coming from the White House — I believe the president made a massive error in judgment,” the Stanford radiologist writes. Atlas saves his strongest praise for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a rising Republican star who may be the GOP nominee in 2024 — and who has taken a notably lax approach to instituting coronavirus restrictions compared with other governors.

“He was virtually always right,” Atlas writes, describing an early 2020 conversation with the Florida governor.

What even ‘tell-alls’ leave unsaid

Even books billed as “tell-alls” don’t reveal the full story.

Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor whom Trump had considered naming coronavirus coordinator, recounted in his own October 2021 memoir, “Republican Rescue,” how Trump called him from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was being treated for covid, to ask whether a similarly sick Christie would publicly blame the president for infecting him.

In a recent podcast, Christie said he was confused about why Trump was so concerned — until Meadows’ memoir revealed that Trump had tested positive several days earlier, hours before Christie met with Trump to do debate preparations.

“None of us found out ‘til Meadows’ book came out. But he tested positive on Saturday morning,” Christie said in June on the “Ruthless” podcast. Then he revealed a detail he hadn’t included in his own memoir — that after Trump was released from the hospital, the president told multiple reporters that Christie was the reason he got sick.

“Now he knows he gave it to me. He knows it,” the former governor said.

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Self awareness level of zero:

[onekidanddone]

29 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Self awareness level of zero:

Pot. Kettle. Dickhead. 

[47of74]

47 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Self awareness level of zero:

Well Donnie, to quote Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Baby, "Figure it out for yourself, dickhead."

[Cults-r-us]

On 8/27/2022 at 12:22 PM, formergothardite said:

I keep stalking the social media pages of all the die hard Trump supporters I know and none of them are mentioning anything about the raid. They are now harping on about how people should pay their debts. I’m not sure what this means in regards to their devotion to Trump. None of them seem slightly interested in Truth social. 

They are complaining about people not paying debts because of Biden' s student loan forgiveness.

[Xan]

The DOJ filing has just dropped.  36 pages.  People are still reading through it but basically it says that he wasn't entitled to the documents because they weren't his to being with.  They even included a photo showing some of the stuff they found.

Spoiler

There are HCS markings for human source intelligence.  In a sane world, this would finish Trump.

They also make a point about obstruction:  "The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation."

They also found classified docs in Trump's desk.

Edited August 31, 2022 by Xan

[BensAllergies]

The passports were found in a desk drawer, per the DOJ’s filing tonight. The search warrant allowed them to take the entire container with them if they found classified documents in it so that their search would not be intrusive. They found classified information in the drawer so they took the drawer with them (or, at least, everything inside of it to look through later). Even though the expired passports were seen as evidence in the investigation, the DOJ explained why they returned them. They do not plan to return all personal effects because they are also seen as evidence in their investigation.

I’m guessing/hoping that the evidence is that Trump was the one person, or one of a few, who had handled those documents and knew where they were, and that the personal effects mixed in with the top secret stuff shows this.

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, BensAllergies said:

I’m guessing/hoping that the evidence is that Trump was the one person, or one of a few, who had handled those documents and knew where they were, and that the personal effects mixed in with the top secret stuff shows this.

I expect the documents are being checked for fingerprints and that there'll be some epic whining tomorrow.

 

[Ozlsn]

On 8/30/2022 at 8:42 AM, SassyPants said:

The people who anger me aren’t the +/- 30% of Trump’s diehard cult followers, but rather the people in charge of our legal system at the highest levels (Congress, DOJ, SCOTUS) who apparently are wavering on right vs wrong because of Trump’s former executive role. Criminal actions are criminal. Treason is treason. Espionage is espionage and inciting violence is inciting violence, no matter the perp’s former job. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW! Those in charge need to get their ducks in a row and send a clear message that criminal behaviors will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law!

Totally  agree. Anyone else would be jailed by now.

 

11 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

In his own book, Atlas reveals his first contribution after joining the administration in July 2020 was to soften a planned Trump tweet, which would have encouraged “everyone” to wear masks to protect against covid. Atlas changed it to stress the value of wearing masks only in crowded places, where social distancing was not possible

I hope he gets sued. 

[apple1]

1 hour ago, Ozlsn said:

I hope he gets sued. 

(Scott Atlas).

He's another one whose medical license should be revoked.

Lost in the egregious other actions of the previous administration is their attraction and support for medical quacks. It's beyond me as to why. (I hadn't even mentioned Ronny Jackson yet).

[Alisamer]

2 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

Totally  agree. Anyone else would be jailed by now.

They keep going on about Obama's "30 million documents" (which were handled totally normally and by the book) and "butter emails" which Hillary has already been cleared of wrongdoing on. Conveniently forgetting that Ivanka did the exact same thing as Hillary while she was working in the white house. They keep trying to find some equivalence and there just isn't, because I don't think even Nixon was this much of a crook. 

But you know full well if Obama had so much as forgotten a note stuck in his jacket pocket or something they'd be all "lock him up" and calling him a thug and all that. But mobster Trumpy can do no wrong apparently, no matter how many laws he breaks.

[BensAllergies]

6 hours ago, Dandruff said:

I expect the documents are being checked for fingerprints

It reminds me of the Josh Duggar case where the feds gathered evidence that he was the one at the computer during the downloads even though others had access.

”Yes that was my desk in my office in my residence but I shared the desk with others! Any one of them could have planted the classified documents in there! And whatever they were I declassified them.”

57 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

Conveniently forgetting that Ivanka did the exact same thing as Hillary while she was working in the white house.

This is actually mentioned in the filing last night. I can’t find it now but it said that NARA believed that members of the Trump admin used non-official messaging channels and did not consistently forward them to the official account for archiving purposes.

Edit: Found it. It was in Attachment A of the exhibit, page 3.

“NARA has also learned that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official electronic messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts, as required by section 2209 of the PRA.”

Edited August 31, 2022 by BensAllergies

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good clip. I think lots of people would like to punch him in the face...