Trump HATED People Taking Notes. His OWN Notes Cripple His Defense

Your read and/or heard plenty of storied about Trump ripping on folks who took notes during meetings, including his lawyers.  Most, but not all of the time he could bully folks into not taking notes.  Hell, after his experience with Jim Comey who started writing his Memo To File in the car as he started his trip home after his first meeting with Trump (and a later one after that could you look the other way with Flynn? differ) Trump was probably angry at the prospect of people writing notes or a memo to file (like Comey did) even if he’d prevented them from doing so in meetings.

If Trump’s compels him to ignore his lawyers and take the stand in his own defense, I hope the groundwork is laid in the evidence/testimony including his own for the prosecutors to ask him this question:  “Did you ever order anyone not to take notes during meetings, or instruct them not to make notes/a record of the meeting afterwards?”  Hell, that’s something prosecutors should ask of some of their witnesses they put on during their own presentation of the case.

So Trump hated people taking notes during meetings.  We have reports of him ripping stuff up, even flushing it down the toilet and so on.  He didn’t want ANY written record of who said what (especially him) for fear it could come back to bite him in the a$$ down the road.  And let’s face it, most of the time Trump has escaped consequences for his misdeeds and even crimes, at least serious enough ones to really hurt him financially.  However, it has given him some valuable experience in dealing with legal problems.  Being a rich and powerful white guy he knew damn well that without “receipts”, tape recordings or records including contemporaneous notes a legal case would become a matter of he (Trump) said vs. what he/she said.  And that being rich, white and powerful would if not always win the day at least reduce any loss to easily manageable proportions.

That’s what makes this article I read earlier so delicious.  And as a “chocoholic” better than any piece of “beautiful chocolate cake, with two or even three scoops of chocolate ice cream.”  If you watch much MSNBC you’re familiar with Joyce Vance.  If not, just so you know she’s a former U.S. Attorney (for Alabama) and not only knows her legal stuff but is good at breaking things down so that non-lawyers can understand what’s in legal filings, and what things in them or a case is important or likely to be.

If you’ve been watching news amidst the holiday and the “Cocaine in the West Wing!  Could, even though he was nowhere near the WH Hunter Biden be involved?” there was also some notice of some of the redactions in Trump’s federal indictment in FL having been UN-redacted.  Ms. Vance, as any good legal mind and pundit would do did a deep dive.  She noticed something on page 58 which she predicts will become very, very “bigly” important.  To wit:

As she explained, at the bottom of paragraph 58 she uncovered some “interesting information.”

According to the warrant, “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,” she explained. “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.”

She went on to explain another couple of key things to remember.  It reinforces what we already know about the strength of the government’s case, and that there’s still stuff we don’t know.  For good measure she notes that with Trump’s lawyers having gotten all the discovery already except for the actual classified documents and some related paperwork involving them they now know how screwed their client is.

As for Trump, given the lengths he’s gone to in his life to keep people from taking notes, to not using email at all, just about anything he could to avoid having a written record that would figuratively (or in this case literally since he handled the documents and I doubt he wiped them down ever single time afterwards) leave his fingerprints on his misdeeds and crimes this will (again) freak him the hell out.   All that effort over decades, and his own making notes being the thing that does him in!

Irony sure as hell deserves a break for a change.  I wish I could celebrate properly on Irony’s behalf.  Screw a piece of chocolate cake with some scoops of ice cream.  I want the whole damned chocolate cake (one of the ones my mom would make from scratch) and the whole damned tub of chocolate ice cream!   I’ve got a new addition for my list of weird fantasies – to have my mom somehow come back from the dead (it’s been almost 50 years) and bake me one of her chocolate cakes like she’d always do for my birthday and on Christmas too.  And have an ice cream store size tub of Ben & Jerry’s (gotta have that logo on the side!) and be able to sit there in the hall outside Trump’s prison cell.  And with my mom (trust me – you think I hate Trump?  She’d make me seem almost MAGA) just out of arms reach and taunt that s.o.b. as we slowly ate our fill.  And left the uneaten portion of the ice cream sitting outside his cell to melt!  (If there were other prisoners, and they weren’t MAGAs we could give each of them an ice cream cone to enjoy as long as they too promised to taunt Trump as they enjoyed their treat!)

Sadly, I’ll have to settle for seeing Trump hoisted on his own giant Sharpie.  Convicted for scribbling notes on classified national security documents.  You’re welcome Irony.