(Photo by Andrew Harrer – Pool/Getty Images)
Another day, another hugely damaging revelation about Trump’s deliberate removal (cough, cough theft) of government documents, as the Washington Post reveals that the National Archives (NARA) was already trying to retrieve material Donald Trump had squirreled away in his residence before he even left office. And they knew he had it because White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told them they should collect that stuff before Trump made off with it.
“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,” NARA’s General Counsel Gary Stern wrote to Trump’s lawyers in May 2021.
Most Law Firms’ AI Strategies Have a Big Blind Spot. Here’s How One Am Law 200 Firm is Solving It.
Most law firms, big and small, that have adopted AI are making the same mistake: they bought a tool for their lawyers and called it a strategy.
The email was part of a long campaign to get back government property, including not only the highly classified documents which prompted the Justice Department to open a grand jury investigation and execute that search warrant on August 8, but also items of a purely sentimental value, such as a “love letter” from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and a mock-up bollard from his “F U Mexico” wall.
The Post reports that Stern spent months trying to get the documents back, to no avail, despite the intercession of Cipollone and his former deputy Pat Philbin.
“We know things are very chaotic, as they always are in the course of a one-term transition,” Stern wheedled, “ … But it is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records.”
In fact, Trump only started returning some of the stuff he improperly retained (cough, cough stole) when NARA said it was going to have to refer the matter to Congress.
The New Way Litigators Handle Depositions Applies AI Every Step Of The Way
Depositions by Filevine help with scheduling, tracking goals, and trial prep.
Kinda gives the lie to Team Trump’s shouting from the rooftops and then in that garbage motion they filed Monday that “All facts laid out herein show that there was complete cooperation between President Trump, his team, and the appropriate agencies.”
So perhaps it’s not surprising that Cipollone and Philbin, as well as John Eisenberg, all of whom had dutifully worked to flout congressional oversight and hide the fact that Trump had attempted to extort the President of Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden, refused to play along when NARA went looking for a Trumpland lawyer to review the seized documents before they could be released to DOJ as part of its investigation.
But you know who did play along? Evan Corcoran, the Baltimore lawyer who put his name on that ridiculous motion claiming total cooperation, despite the fact that he, as one of the the only lawyers willing to do it, had been negotiating with the Justice Department and the Archives for months, even as his client retained numerous top secret government documents after being subpoenaed for their return. Although props for describing Trump as “voluntarily accept[ing] service of a grand jury subpoena,” while glossing over the fact that he never complied with it.
Not a great look, TBH.
Archives asked for records in 2021 after Trump lawyer agreed they should be returned, email says [WaPo]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.