Trump Charged With 37 counts of Espionage, Obstruction and related crimes

[Frelga]

Apologies for an irrelevancy, but why are all these people have names like they are in old DC comics m. Nauta. Habba. Even Trump is such a lazy villain name. And Cannon could be a hero.

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[N.E. Brigand]

Talk about birds of a feather!

EXCLUSIVE: Walt Nauta, the valet at the center of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, was only hired by Trump after the Navy pulled him from the White House amid sexual misconduct allegations from multiple women. Me
@thedailybeast

https://www.thedailybeast.com/walt-naut ... -lago-case

Also in this case, ABC reports that the "Special Counsel's office questioned witnesses about two rooms that the FBI didn't search inside Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence":

Special counsel Jack Smith's team has questioned several witnesses about a closet and a so-called "hidden room" inside former President Donald Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago that the FBI didn't check while searching the estate in August 2022, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

As described to ABC News, the line of questioning in several interviews ahead of Trump's indictment last year on classified document charges suggests that -- long after the FBI seized dozens of boxes and more than 100 documents marked classified from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate -- Smith's team was trying to determine if there might still be more classified documents there.

[N.E. Brigand]

In a filng Friday, Jack Smith said that 45,000 unvetted people were in Mar-a-Lago while Donald Trump had classfied documents.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That was quite a filing.

[N.E. Brigand]

No surprise here, but I'm sure that the Trump crowd will spin it as being evidence of a "two-tiered" justice system.

The report won't be issued for at least another six weeks, though. Maybe this leak will tamp down on idle speculation?

And it's worth re-emphasizing that Special Counsel Robert Hur was a Donald Trump appointee...

It's now been eleven weeks since I wrote that. But apparently the report is expected soon. I saw a story earlier today that the White House fears that Hur's report, while unlikely to find anything illegal happened, will be politically embarrassing.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I've seen it described as that they are afraid that Hur will "pull a Comey."

[N.E. Brigand]

I've seen it described as that they are afraid that Hur will "pull a Comey."

A key difference may be that because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had visited with Bill Clinton when their planes were adjacent at the Phoenix airport, she said she would accept the finding of FBI Director James Comey, and Comey thought he had to demonstrate his independence. Also when Comey was eventually fired by Donald Trump, the nominal reason (but not the real reason) was that he mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton.

And now multiple outlets today reported that Robert Hur's report is expected "in the coming days" and that no charges will be filed.

[N.E. Brigand]

I've seen it described as that they are afraid that Hur will "pull a Comey."

CNN: "Garland notifies Congress that special counsel Hur has concluded investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents."

The White House counsel is reviewing the report "for executive privilege issues" and should complete that work this week, following which Garland will deliver it to Congress.

Edited to add: Hur will doubtless be required to testify before Congress, where Republicans will make what they can of this report.

[N.E. Brigand]

I've seen it described as that they are afraid that Hur will "pull a Comey."

The report is out.

As expected, no charges, but Hur says that Biden is an elderly man with a poor memory.

Edited to add a direct link to the report.

[N.E. Brigand]

The 388-page report includes a rebuttal on pp. 384-388 from the president's lawyers, who point out that witnesses often have hazy memories about years-old events.

I was just at the hospital visiting my dad who had hernia surgery today. He's spent many weeks in the hospital over the past few years. (He's doing generally fine now and today's surgery went well.) He (age 78), my stepmother (age 69), and I (age 51) struggled to recall when he previously had a hernia surgery. Was it 2019 or 2020 or 2021? Eventually we worked it out, but it took some time.

The lawyers also point out some mistakes in the report that tend to show a bias against President Biden.

[N.E. Brigand]

John Harwood notes that he interviewed President Biden just a few days earlier and the President was mentally alert about current events:

[N.E. Brigand]

I do look forward to Donald Trump sitting for a two-day interview with Jack Smith.

And then for him sitting for a two-day interview with Robert Mueller.

[N.E. Brigand]

Heck, even in his written answers to Mueller, Trump said "I don't recall" dozens of times over the space of just a few pages.

[N.E. Brigand]

Anyway, President Biden was fully exonerated by Special Counsel Hur.

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Edited to add: It's notable that Donald Trump said today that Joe Biden was only pretending to have a bad memory in order to avoid prosecution.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

As biased as Hur's report is, he still takes pains to distinguish Biden's situation from Trump's.

[N.E. Brigand]

Interesting to see in the report that Ronald Reagan did the same thing as Joe Biden. I was unaware of this history:

Contemporaneous evidence suggests that when Mr. Biden left office in 2017, he believed he was allowed to keep the notebooks in his home. In a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in April 2017, Mr. Biden explained that, despite his staff's views to the contrary, he did not think he was required to turn in his notecards to the National Archives--where they were stored in a SCIF--and he had not wanted to do so. At trial, he would argue plausibly that he thought the same about his notebooks.

If this is what Mr. Biden thought, we believe he was mistaken about what the law permits, but this view finds some support in historical practice. The clearest example is President Reagan, who left the White House in 1989 with eight years' worth of handwritten diaries, which he appears to have kept at his California home even though they contained Top Secret information. During criminal litigation involving a former Reagan administration official in 1989 and 1990, the Department of Justice stated in public court filings that the "currently classified" diaries were Mr. Reagan's "personal records." Yet we know of no steps the Department or other agencies took to investigate Mr. Reagan for mishandling classified information or to retrieve or secure his diaries. Most jurors would likely find evidence of this precedent and Mr. Biden's claimed reliance on it, which we expect would be admitted at trial, to be compelling evidence that Mr. Biden did not act willfully.

FYI, when you copy directly from Hur's report to this forum, "Mr. Biden" becomes "Mr. Eiden." I have corrected that here.

[N.E. Brigand]

It's only been three months since this happened:

"Donald Trump forgot what years he served as president while on the stand in his New York fraud trial Monday. He claimed at one point that he did not pay attention to his company's financial statements in 2021 due to his busy schedule as commander-in-chief—despite the fact that he left office in January."

I had forgotten that. I guess I'm going senile.

[N.E. Brigand]

President Biden reacts to the release of the report:



I found a longer video here. This is my transcript of it:

The Special Counsel released their finding today about their look into my handling of classified documents. I was pleased to see they reached a conclusion I believed, and knew all along, they would: that there are no charges [that] should be brought in this case. [audience cheers] As many of you know, this was an exhaustive investigation going back literally more than 40 years: 40 years, when I became a United States Senator when I was a kid. [audience laughs] I was a kid: 29 years old. The Special Counsel acknowledged I cooperated completely. I did not throw up any roadblocks. I sought no delays. In fact, I was so determined to give the Special Counsel what they needed [that] I went forward with a five-hour in-person interview over the two days of October 8th and 9th last year, even though Israel had just been attacked by Hamas on the 7th. I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.

I was especially pleased to see the Special Counsel made clear the stark differences between this case and Donald Trump. As the Special Counsel wrote, and I quote, "Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump's case and Mr. Biden's are clear." By the way, this is a Republican Counsel. "Most notably, after given multiple chances" -- this is a continuation of the quote -- "to return classified documents and avoid a prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite." This is continuing to quote: "According to the indictment, he not only refused to return classified documents after many months, he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to a search of multiple locations including his homes, and sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation." That's the distinction, among others.

The bottom line is: the Special Counsel, in my case, decided against moving forward with any charges. This matter is now closed.

He's right about how far back Hur looked: the report talks about documents dating to the 1970s.

It's interesting that he mentioned Donald Trump. He has generally avoided commenting on Trump's cases, presumably for fear of claims that the prosecutions were politically motivated. I note he was careful here to only quote from the report on that subject.

Edited to add: it's also newsworthy that Joe Biden didn't ask for any redactions, and the report was released almost immediately upon submission.

Unlike the Mueller report.

[N.E. Brigand]

Biden just took questions for about ten minutes from reporters at the White House.

[N.E. Brigand]

Heh. As I mentioned in the Israel/Gaza thread, President Biden took some flak tonight because as he was explaining how he had pressured President Sisi of Egypt to accept Gaza refugees, he said "Mexico" instead of "Egypt."

Now, I'm not saying that Biden was aware of this, but it turns out that there's a been a long-running gag in Egyptian social media (for reportedly complicated reasons that I haven't examined) to refer to President Sisi as "The Mexican." So Egyptians are loving Biden's gaffe tonight.

But more notably, just a couple hours later, Donald Trump said that Hungary's leader, Viktor Orban, is the president of Turkey.

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Speaking of Donald Trump: a day or two ago in the Mar-a-Lago documents criminal case, Judge Cannon ruled that some sensitive information could be disclosed, a at the request of the defendants. Today Jack Smith filed to ask Cannon to reconsider, and he hinted that if she doesn't, he will appeal her decision to the 11th Circuit. Apparently he's concerned about witnesses being threatened.