For the moment pundits are focusing on what is known because it’s too terrifying to speculate about the unknown, but the simple facts are: 1) 48 empty folders marked “Classified” are in the FBI inventory just released and 2) We already know that Trump commingled government documents with clothing, newspaper clippings, books and personal paraphernalia. So, what dear God was in those folders? And where are the contents now? Vladimir Putin’s desk? New York Times:
The filing, a detailed list of items retrieved in the search, was unsealed on Friday as part of the court fight over whether to appoint an independent arbiter to review the materials taken by federal agents when they descended on Mr. Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago, on Aug. 8.
Along with the empty folders with classified markings, the F.B.I. also recovered 40 more empty folders that said they contained sensitive documents the user should “return to staff secretary/military aide,” the inventory said. It also said that agents found seven documents marked as “top secret” in Mr. Trump’s office and 11 more in a storage room.
The list and an accompanying court filing from the Justice Department did not say if all the contents of the empty folders had been recovered. But the filing noted that the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s handling of the documents remained “an active criminal investigation.” […]
In all, the list said, the F.B.I. retrieved 18 documents marked as top secret, 54 marked as secret, 31 marked as confidential — and 11,179 government documents or photographs without classification markings.
That’s the basic state of play, but as always, since this is Trump world, it gets worse. This revelation of the extent of the missing documents shines a spotlight on how egregious the actions of Trump’s attorneys were, in signing documents certifying that documents had been returned to the government as requested, when in fact that is glaringly not the case.
Here’s a link to Raw Story, which contains a Rumble video at the end. It’s seven minutes of an MSNBC segment and it encapsulates the situation with Trump’s lawyers’ “lying and deceit” and how they are now going to become witnesses in this case.
Michael Cohen said yesterday that Trump’s attorneys, notably Alina Habba and Christina Bobb, were in a world of hurt and needed to lawyer up. Today that prediction seems to have come true.
Whether Trump’s lawyers were misled by Trump or whether they were complicit in the concealment of the documents is not known but that is one direction that this investigation is headed next.
This needs to be emphasized: the folder itself usually isn’t classified. The documents inside it are classified. If the folder was no longer being used to house classified records, anything could have been put in it.
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) September 2, 2022
if that was done in a proper fashion, yes, but I don't think that occurred. I think they were transported to MAL in those folders.
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) September 2, 2022
Where are the documents that used to be in the empty folders?#TrumpStoleTheDocs pic.twitter.com/f8JHWY9gie
— ;☮️Name's H͎o͎w͎, the OG Meme Thief ; (@MyOneAndOnlyKat) September 2, 2022
This is beyond scary. Trump and the people around him were not competent to be the custodian of records for Top Secret material.
There’s a man who lives a life of danger…
Everyone he meets he stays a stranger…
Every move he makes…
Another chance he takes…
Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow.
Secret agent man. Secret agent man.
They’ve given you a number
And taken away your name. (The theme song of the show).
Add the dead agents, etc.to orange hitler’s list of his victims killed.
Wonder in what bank account did he stash the money for selling secrets?
plugz did a punk spanish version of secret agent man. El hombre secreto
Funny. Patrick Googan would be proud. Of course he moved on to play the king in Braveheart. Money & power corrupt!
I remember the 1960’s TV show with Parick McGoohan. Great stuff.
Trump and the people around him were not competent to run the country.
He’s not even able to run a real-estate firm…
That was the tragedy of the whole thing. There’s an old business expression, “If you don’t know how to do something, you need to know how to hire it done.” He didn’t know that he didn’t know plus he had no clue how to hire anything done. To use a Trumpian word, “Disaster.”
He went broke running a *casino*.
He went broke robbing a casino…..FIFY
He can’t manage his chyna.
…
Come on Al. There’s equal justice under the law and merrick is gonna prove it. Hahaha ha. He’s a little late I’d say…about twenty fucking years late. Oh and last time I checked, traitor in chief at this moment is playing golf, grabbing pussy, not Natasha’s of course, & downing some KFC. Must be hell. Being on double secret probation. Pure fucking hell.
Yeah, yeah, keep doing the opposition’s work for them if that’s your copium. Meanwhile back in the real world, I’ve come to peace with the fact that the legal system runs on something other than outrage logic.
Then you’ve come to peace with institutionalized injustice.
I’ll just leave this here, a very special message from someone who worked that system and yet never lost her faith in it:
Couldn’t comment on ms Teri since there was no comment box. Good for her. She kept her status as an attorney and never was sent to the penitentiary as a political prisoner. The pity of the winners of the system is your argument? Wow. Our education system could use an overhaul.
You do understand irony? You accuse me of doing the ‘work’ for the opposition? When you keep making excuses for the lack of prosecution of their crimes, especially Trump, you are doing what fox ‘news’ does nightly…pointing out the truth is the last thing the opposition wants. But…but…but…by the way…they don’t need help. They’ve had criminal presidents since Nixon. The last two weren’t even elected. No worries. Youre’ a full glass of water. You know everything. Sure.
I like reading comments from the both of you, even if I don’t always agree with either of you on some things. Having said that I feel compelled to toss in my two cents. First, it’s become clear (to me at least) in the past month or so that DOJ has been hard at work behind the scenes. Not just the stuff we’ve seen with the J6 stuff. Second, white collar cases are tougher. It’s not right. It’s not fair but it’s a cold, hard reality because white collar prosecutions involve defendants that have resources. They can not only hire a team of lawyers equal too or better than the (whether state level or federal) govt. but sometimes better ones. (Of course, Trump has trouble on that score because few top lawyers are willing to sign on with him) And finally, juries that can process all the evidence in a white collar prosecution are difficult to find. Worse, in an age of celebrity some only want to serve on such a jury so they can maybe make some coin writing a book or some other thing to make money off their “service.”
As everyone knows, someone acquitted of a crime after a trial cannot be tried again on those same charges. A sometimes “workaround” of using parts of a state level case to bring federal civil rights charges starts out with a good possibility of a guilty verdict being overturned on appeal. But when the charges (of any type) are federal then that’s the whole ballgame right there. You either win or lose and if it’s the latter prosecutors can’t do jack shit about it. I for one think far too many federal prosecutors are too timid to bring anything less than a slam-dunk case, and even at the state level in a high profile case many DAs are hesitant. Just look at DA Bragg in NYC who ran on promising to carry through with what Vance had set up for him but chickening out, and getting blasted by some quite accomplished prosecutors on the case saying he was gutless when they resigned in protest over dropping the case against Trump!
In The Prince there’s the oft repeated quote that if you strike at a king you must kill him.
I think that weighed on Speaker Pelosi for a long time and she took a lot of shit for Trump not getting impeached by the House long before the first round of Articles of Impeachment were passed and given to the Senate. She knew, as I think any of us who have a fucking clue their would never be enough Republicans to go along to meet the two-thirds threshold for conviction. Hell, we were even (with some justification) worried a couple of DEMOCRATS might give Trump a pass. But the attempted extortion of the then new Ukrainian President left no choice.
I’m still haunted by part of Adam Schiff’s summation, because just as Pelosi (and many of us) feared a failure by the Senate (again, a foregone conclusion from the start) to convict Trump and remove him from office would only embolden him, just like Barr’s completing Rosenstein’s work to ensure Mueller’s investigation was sabotaged emboldened Trump. The GOP knew Trump knew he was untouchable and were (and remain) afraid of him. Even though Jan. 6 was enough to get some Republicans to vote to convict in the second impeachment it still wasn’t anywhere near close enough. McConnell COULD have (I believe) engineered a different outcome and Trump would be forever barred from any public office again. But even McConnell was scared and when it came decision time he choked. Trump has been able to spend his post Presidency setting himself up as the ruler of the GOP and controlling the narrative – something he wouldn’t have had much success at doing had he been convicted in the second impeachment. I firmly believe after a while although he’d pop up sometimes most Republicans would have moved on from him.
I also want to get into how DOJ has, with the exception of the Trump years worked. They do their work privately and don’t speak until it’s time to say something in a court filing or in open court. It was jarring to see them go back to the traditonal way of doing things and yes, like others I wanted them to move and move fast. However, the DOJ was like other institutions badly damaged by Trump and his appointees. They lost a lot of talented and experienced people, yet were tasked with engaging in the LARGEST case (as in number of individuals to investigate, prosecutions to pursue etc.) in their history while at the same time trying to rebuild the agency. AND there is the other stuff with Trump, which again we can see they’ve been working on for a long time. By any typical DOJ standards what we are seeing is actually relatively quick movement against Trump.
But it’s clear to me now that Garland, while methodical (perhaps as I’m sure you believe) sometimes to a fault has had them examining Trump’s potential criminal actions and working to develop prosecutable cases. Cases that even if it weren’t Trump would be a three ring circus simply because a former President was invovled. DOJ also has to contend with the very real possibility of jury nullification and has to have something so airtight that even a Trump supporter, like that lady in Manafort’s trial in Alexandria said she didn’t want to do it but had to vote to convict him.
Garland gets just the ONE shot at Trump. For me, it would be like back in my jarhead days. Luckily it never came to it but if worse had come to worse I might have had to square off against an enemy tank with nothing but an old (now obsolete) LAW rocket from less than a hundred meters. Somehow managing not to get killed by the tank’s machine guns and getting into a position where I could fire at the exact flat spot where the front of the tank angles down to the ground. That would be the only chance of blowing up the tank and saving my own life.
THAT my friend is what Garland and the DOJ would be facing in a prosecution of Trump. It doesn’t matter how solid the case is, it will still be an epic fight in court and probably in the jury room too. I can only imagine the death threats jurors and their families, friends and even their places of employment will get. However it sure looks like Garland is pushing his people to bring a case to file. More than one in fact. But rushing, especially when it looks like things are looking good is like being most of the way through a minefield and deciding that last ten or twenty feet is okay – and stepping on a mine instead of making damned sure the path was clear every inch of the way.
One chance. One shot. If the king isn’t “killed” then there will be no stopping Trump and the MAGAts because no Republican will ever stand up to them or even seriously think about doing so again. I want Trump in jail. If magic were real and it could be retroactive so much the better. I also hate having to wait, but I also know enough about how the criminal justice system works (and doesn’t!) when it comes to rich and/or powerful people. If you think things got worse (which they did) after Trump skated on the Mueller Report and the two impeachments you ain’t seen nothin compared to how bad it will get if he’s brought up on federal charges and walks.
ONE shot.
son of a mother!
So…did no one hear about a very telling bust that just happened in New York? To wit, one Viktor Vekselberg just got evidence seized from his two properties there, including a Park Avenue address. Now supposedly this is all about drying Putin’s finances for his little war in Ukraine, as Vekselberg is described as a “close ally”. That would certainly account for the massive amounts of boxed documents that came out.
BUT…suppose, just suppose, some or all of the missing docs at Trump’s place are, in fact, what Vekselberg had? One theory I’ve heard is that, assuming this hypothesis is so, those files were actually a plant which they were able to trace.
Never forget this…with Trump, all roads lead to Ukraine. What happened to us was just a bonus but never the point of Putin’s screwing with us.
I don’t want to hear one word about how the orange chump didn’t know that taking those documents was not okay. This guy, who occupied the highest position in the country, should have had at least a modicum of intelligence about our laws. He’s been given so many passes for being stupid about what is and isn’t lawful. Why would anyone want someone that ignorant of our laws and protocols to occupy the Oval Office. It just astounds me.
Trump went into the Presidency thinking it would be nothing more than a bunch of photo ops and hobnobbing with other “big shots” and, given the way the media fawned all over him throughout 2016, he saw it was a way to keep his name (and, conveniently, all his business interests) in the news.
Or, to put it more simply, he wanted the title but none of the actual work. (And, to a very large extent, that’s what he got.)
Arrest him. Give him a Federal public defender. Tell him he isn’t going anywhere until he reveals where the contents of the empty folders are.
I’m wondering how the orange fart would respond to a comment that if he has sold even one document to another country’s government like the Saudi’s, so willing to send funds to trump, he might face a justified execution … firing squad or hung by the neck, just maybe, those missing documents could be found somehow …? /S