Government

Trump's Theft Of Documents Lands Like Flaming Bag Of Dogsh*t In DOJ's Mail Box

Good morning, Merrick Garland!

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Who could have predicted that the same people who spent five years howling to put Hillary Clinton in email jail over her basement server would be ludicrously careless with classified material?

Oh, everybody? Right.

In the past 24 hours, there have been four stories about the contents of the 15 boxes of purloined presidential material retrieved from Mar-a-Lago last week by the National Archives. The former president has been litigating the scope of the Presidential Records Act in his dispute with the January 6 Select Committee. And although the statute has no enforcement mechanism — because it never occurred to anyone that America would elect a totally lawless president — it seems certain that Trump will contribute further caselaw on the issue.

After breaking the story last week, the Washington Post revealed yesterday that Trump walked out of the White House with a trove of documents, including love letters from North Korean despot Kim Jong Un, and a letter from Barack Obama to his successor. He also pocketed a replica of Air Force One, which he displayed at his Florida club, a mock up bollard from his supposedly unscalable border wall, and the map which infamously doctored with a Sharpie to make his predictions about the path of Hurricane Dorian “true.”

The paper also broke the news that the National Archives had referred the matter to the Justice Department to see if Trump had broken any laws by … violating the law.

Right on cue, the New York Times reported that there were classified materials in the retrieved cache, although, as the paper points out, Trump had the power to declassify anything he wanted until January 20, 2021. According to the Times, the DOJ promptly kicked the matter back to the Archives, telling the agency to have its own inspector general investigate the matter.

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The Times also noted Trump’s habit of ripping up documents at the White House, forcing his own staff to pull scraps from the trash and sift through so called “burn bags” for presidential material, handing them over to the Archives to be taped back together as necessary.

Which was right in time for Axios’s morning scoop from an upcoming book by Times reporter Maggie Haberman that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper.”

Which is pretty much prima facia evidence of intent to destroy a document. And also a cosmic callback to the White House Plumbers that makes you wonder if we’re living in a broken simulation.

Naturally Trump rounded out the news cycle by issuing a statement of denial, padded with attacks on all his enemies.

“The media’s characterization of my relationship with NARA is Fake News. It was exactly the opposite! It was a great honor to work with NARA to help formally preserve the Trump Legacy,” he said, sidestepping the issue of how the items came to be unlawfully retained in the first place and promising that the items would soon be on display in his presidential library, allowing the public “to view my Administration’s incredible accomplishments for the American People.”

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The former president insists that he had been “told” — many people are saying! — that he was “under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years.” He probably meant to specify which legal rulings he’d been “told” about, but he got distracted by the inevitable diatribe about “Crooked Hillary Clinton” and her emails, the minor scandal when the Clintons had to return gifts improperly retained, and “We won’t even mention what is going on with the White House in the current, or various past administrations.”

He characterizes Haberman’s scoop as “another fake story” cooked up “by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book.” Or perhaps she is in cahoots with dastardly Democrats, “just using this and the Unselect Committee of political hacks as a camoflauge [sic] for how horribly our Country is doing under the Biden Administration.”

Then the twice-impeached politician who campaigned on a promise to LOCK HER UP his political opponent for mishandling classified emails, complained that “In the United States there has unfortunately become two legal standards, one for Republicans and one for Democrats. It should not be that way!”

And he’s absolutely right. But perhaps not in the way he thinks.

National Archives asks Justice Dept. to investigate Trump’s handling of White House records [Wapo]
Archives Found Possible Classified Material in Boxes Returned by Trump [NYT]
Haberman book: Flushed papers found clogging Trump WH toilet [Axios]

Liz Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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