What Were You Expecting?

 

Image by Nicholas Konrad for The New Yorker, from David Rohde's coverage of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, August 2022.

The defense secretary makes more use of that inadequately secured communications platform than he originally said, like to keep his missus and his brother apprised of his military activities, thus endangering national security even more than when he did this with members of the Principals Committee, plus the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic (who wasn't supposed to be there but seems to be the only person involved who had a clue on how to behave in a situation where sensitive information is being discussed). Hegseth seems extremely reliant on the missus and the brother, dragging the one of them to meetings for which she hasn't got an appropriate, or indeed any, security clearance, and appointing the other to a Pentagon sinecure, and I can't help thinking their job is to carry the hip flasks, but who knows. 

The punditry explodes with excitement: surely the president will have to fire him now, but that's not what happens when the president is informed:

Mr. Hegseth called the president around 8 p.m., said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had Mr. Hegseth’s back. The president also said he had plenty of experience dealing with leakers.

As far as Trump is concerned, the problem isn't that Hegseth is a threat to national security, it's that disgruntled leakers let everybody know about it. That's what those leakers do, probably because of whatever it was that disgruntled them. Once disgruntled, twice shy.

Indeed it might be the still gruntled ones who are the greater problem, like the White House anonymi who persuaded NPR to report that Trump was actively seeking a new defense secretary. At least the disgruntled ones are likely to be telling us the truth—that more or less everything is out of control.

Radio Yerevan: The Immunity Question

 

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Donald Trump had an Article II where he had the right to do whatever he wanted as president?

Answer: In principle, yes, but

• first of all, he didn't really have it so much as he had access to it, as we all do, in the US Constitution, which is in the public domain, and easily accessible in excellent editions online if you don't want to burden yourself with a print copy;
• second of all, it describes what the president is required to do (to take care that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed), not what he has the right to do, which may not be the same thing at all, other than issuing pardons and making his own decisions on who he wants to name as ambassadors and cabinet secretaries and the like—and it specifically lists some things that he is absolutely not allowed to do, although he did in fact do them, such as taking money in exchange for hotel rooms and food and beverage service at his businesses from representatives of foreign governments, which isn't supposed to happen because it could be an efficient way of accepting bribe money if it were allowed; and
• third of all, he isn't president any more, at least at the moment, specifically because he also didn't have the right to stay in office after he lost his reelection bid, no matter how much he wanted to. Not that he didn't try.

One of the craziest pieces of news on this newsy day filled in some details on a Trump incident we heard about back when it happened, in summer 2019, when US intelligence caught an extraordinary satellite photo of the accidental explosion of an Iranian missile at its launch site, very classified, and sent it to the White House, and Trump promptly tweeted it.

What's news about this is what ABC News appears to have unearthed from the special counsel's investigation of the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case, involving what Trump thought he was doing:

It's the Law

The thing that's making me grumpiest at the moment is when defendant Trump says, "the Presidential Records Act says they belong to me," and all the Republicans chime in, when that's in fact the exact opposite of what the Presidential Records Act says, according to the FAQ at the National Archives website:

Recent media reports have generated a large number of queries about Presidential records and the Presidential Records Act (PRA), 44 U.S.C. 2201-2209. The PRA requires that all records created by Presidents (and Vice-Presidents) be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at the end of their administrations. Below is additional information about how NARA carries out its responsibilities under the PRA. Please note that the PRA treats the records of the President and those of the Vice President in almost the same manner such that, in most cases below, President and Vice President can be used interchangeably. 

It's understood that a president or vice president probably has some personal documents that don't belong in the National Archives, though I suppose all of Trump's relationships are so transactional that it's hard to tell the difference

DJT: Hey Malenia can u fit me in for blowie thurs betw 11 11:30?

MKT: Ok daddy car need new transmission pls send deposit also Slov ambassador deep concern Austrian trrop concentration near Ljubljana

But the president is required to sort those out before the new person is inaugurated, and leave the non-personal docs where they are or arrange for their transfer to their new owners, the American people, as represented by the Archive.

There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports. If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA. 

But he can't keep the

[TS//SI//NF//FISA] Undated document concerning military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States, with handwritten annotation in black marker

just because he wrote on it with his Sharpie, and he can't keep the doctored hurricane map either.  He couldn't legally have kept the first one if he had succeeded in declassifying it, for that matter. He can't keep any of the 337 documents with classification markings regardless of whether they're still classified. He can't keep most of the 13,000 unclassified documents in the 80 boxes. They all belong to us and NARA.

I can understand why they didn't charge this as a crime. The theft itself occurred in DC, and they decided to file the charges in Florida's Southern District. Moreover, the Presidential Records Act, like so many laws the president is supposed to follow, as we learned to our horror during the Trump administration, suggest any way of enforcing it or penalties for breaking it. (Even though it was Nixon's behavior in trying to sell presidential records that convinced Congress to pass the law in the first place.)

And the indictment rightfully focuses on classified documents among the 31 the prosecutors chose for filing charges, because those are the ones with which Trump really did endanger national security, and/or offer Trump opportunities for cashing in with some of his preferred foreign-government clients (looking at Lawfare's annotated list, I'm guessing typically Saudi Arabia or Turkey, but there are no doubt others).

But I wish they'd managed to say somewhere in there that Trump doesn't have any right whatsoever to any of them, and cited the law that says so, because it's true.

All the President's Minions

My Substack post on the Nunes-Meadows theft of classified documents related to the Russia investigation, with a lot of material you-all have seen before but quite a bit of new stuff and response to the Trump indictment.

Victory Laps

Time for another victory lap, or two. I told you so, doubters:

Seven counts, and, says The Guardian, and the other papers,

At least some of the counts filed in federal district court in Miami by the office of special counsel Jack Smith include the willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, false statements and concealment under title 18 of the US criminal code, the person said.

"Willful retention of national defense information" is espionage, in the definition provided by the Espionage Act, if you missed that. For what it's worth. I'm afraid it's not espionage in the everyday sense of the word: that's acquiring national defense information with a specific motivation:

with the intent for that information to be used against the United States or for the gain of any foreign nation  

which doesn't seem to be alleged here; it's not going to be selling stuff to the Russians or the Chinese or the Saudis. Which is not to say that he necessarily didn't do that but that the special counsel's office doesn't have proof of it. I, as you know, don't think spying in that sense is a significant part of what Trump was doing with the document collection (though I still think Jared Kushner must have been supplying information from the President's Daily Briefing to Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and I know PDBs were included in the stuff squirreled away in Trump's Palm Beach place), so I'm not surprised, but I do hope, narratologically speaking, that they won't make this a bloodless legalist argument about whether the conditions of the statute are met, but rather work to show what Trump and his goons were trying to accomplish by the thefts.

That, as I was just saying a while back, could be part of the prosecutorial point of that Bedminster audio of his interview with Meadows's ghostwriters, that it illustrates him trying to use the stolen documents to implicate his enemies, who included not just those FBI persecutors but also, for instance, General Milley, and Susan Glasser's article showing Milley restraining him from committing war crimes in the final days. CNN has now gotten hold of a transcript:

“Well, with Milley – uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump says, according to the transcript. “They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”

Trump continues: “All sorts of stuff – pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”

"I just found" this classified report sitting on my desk that happens to prove my point but you're not allowed to look at it. And then the ghostwriters dutifully added the lie to the book:

Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”

And Kash Patel continually teased the classified documents that would reveal the plots of which Trump was a victim, throughout 2021 and 2022, without ever showing them, as he told "Clay and Buck":

“And what [Trump] did was on his way out of the White House, he declassified — made available to every American citizen in the world — large volumes of information relating, not just to Russiagate, but to national security matters, to the Ukraine impeachment, to his impeachment one, impeachment two.”

They had to be classified documents to explain why the reporters never got a chance to look!

Speaking of Meadows and, not coincidentally, of stolen classified documents, does anybody remember our discovery last January in the J6 Committee testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson that Meadows was a document thief too, receiving classified materials from the House Intelligence Committee passed to him by Devin Nunes, photocopying them in the White House and taking a bunch of them home, where he intended to get them to fascist journalists John Solomon (now Trump's designated representative along with Patel with the National Archives) and Mollie Hemingway? 

I'd pretty much given up hope that anybody professional was ever going to go there, but Hutchinson's testimony has now been discovered by the great Murray Waas, who has posted his findings on Substack, proving, at least, that I wasn't hallucinating this stuff, so I'm giving myself a victory lap on that too.

Namely, in late January, I wrote:

Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to The Independent and the great Murray Waas:

Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.

A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took “thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.

I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side.

That's now happened. Waas's treatment misses some important details, I think, and I'll be posting something on that at Substack before too long. In the meantime, a happy Indictment Weekend to you all!

Indictment Time?

 

Secretary of State James G. Blaine as the tail manipulating dogsbody president Benjamin Harrison, 1891. Via.

A lot of Independent Counsel news coming down the pike, and in a familiar kind of sequencing, as the leakers—attorneys and friends of the possible targets and defendants—seek to seize whatever control they can of the emerging narrative, while Gym Jordan pulls out a distraction: in March, ahead of the Manhattan Trump indictment, Jordan and Elise Stefanik and J.D. Vance were pulling out the story of how DA Vance is a paid puppet of the financier George Soros; last week Jordan sent his demand to Attorney General Merrick Garland for information on the ongoing special counsel investigations, including names for the FBI personnel involved, while new information kept emerging about the moving round of documents throughout 2022 at Maga-Lardo.

So this evening, The Guardian reports that Trump's lawyers have been formally notified that he is a target in the case of the stolen presidential documents case, and The Independent announces that the federal grand jury in DC will be asked to vote on charges tomorrow 

It is understood that prosecutors intend to ask grand jurors to vote on indictments on Thursday, but that vote could be delayed as much as a week until the next meeting of the grand jury to allow for a complete presentation of evidence, or to allow investigators to gather more evidence for presentation of necessary.

(though it could take up to a week before they do the actual voting). They're also claiming that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has done what Trump likes to call "flipping"

Narratology: White Whale

Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to The Independent and the great Murray Waas:

Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.

A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took “thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.

I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side. We've known something about these documents for a long time—Trump started claiming he had already declassified a stash of documents on the subject as early as a Tweet of October 2020—

“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

 —which, like so many Trump statements, was more aspiration than fact; it wasn't, in fact, until January 19 2021, the day before the Biden inauguration, that, with some documents in hand, in a "binder" he'd received from the Justice Department on December 30, he finally issued a memorandum to the attorney general, DNI, and DCI directing them to declassify it, with the redactions demanded by the FBI. I don't think it's been reported whether they obeyed this order, but it also seems certain that at least one copy of those materials, probably without redactions and with intact classification markings, was among the stuff stolen and sent to Trump's Palm Beach club that day, along with at least one copy of the classified stuff stolen from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by Chairman Nunes and Chief of Staff Meadows that the staff had made so many photocopies of on the same day. 

What I'm saying is that Jack Smith seems to have come to the same conclusion as I did on a motive for at least some of the Mar-a-Lago document theft—his long quest to avenge himself on the FBI and everyone who exposed his collusion with Russian intelligence in the 2016 election, and (taking it, as I always do, just a notch farther than the reported story) that will be the basis on which Trump is indicted in this case. As, I think, I've been telling you.

Not only that, but also this week is the wonderful reporting in The New York Times by Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner that shows former attorney general Billy Barr pushing special counsel John Durham on the same quest to incriminate the FBI and others over the Crossfire Hurricane and Robert Mueller investigations in the face of the fact that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing to begin with, and of course practically none squeezed out after millions of dollars and years of effort (one minor deception in the filing of the third renewal request on the surveillance order against Carter Page, discovered not by the special counsel but the FBI inspector general. Corroborating what I've been telling you since October 2019  at least, including anticipations of this week's stories in

• that snipe hunt for evidence in Italy where Barr and Durham came up dry, in October 2019, and the switch to a criminal investigation, of which I wrote at the time

"It's about Trump, and the idée fixe of Trump's increasing paranoia: that he must get to his enemies by using their weapons, of saying "bad things" and getting "dirt". Investigate them all! Lock them up! And its failure so far, which has been accelerating in recent weeks, as Barr's meta-investigation falls apart. "

• the pressure on inspector general Horowitz to come up with the stuff in April 2020, with a nod to John Solomon's participation in the effort going back to August 2019

"My [i.e., Solomon's] reporting, including interviews with four dozen U.S. officials over the last several months, actually identifies a much larger collection of documents — about a dozen all together — that, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by Democrats"

• the use of Russian intelligence disinformation to hint at a bogus case against Hillary Clinton "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service" in October 2020 (with a guest appearance by the big binder mentioned above, delivered by DNI John Ratcliffe to Barr's DOJ)

It's always seemed me that this was one big story, starring mad Trump as Captain Ahab after the white whale of the FBI, and all Trump's henchmen from Solomon and Patel back to Bully Barr as the Pequod's doomed crew (Cassie Hutchinson is Ishmael, alone escaped to tell thee?), only it's not a ship but a criminal outfit. And now the news narrative is finally coalescing to my point, under Jack Smith's guidance. I think there could be a lot of indictments, though sadly not of Barr and Durham, who are in some ways the most reprehensible of all (committing some of the exact same crimes of which they falsely allowed Hillary Clinton, together with Comey, McCabe, Mueller, and others, to be accused), and it's looking as if I've had pretty good instincts on this up to now.

For the Record: More-a-Lago

 

Look for the helpers! Just straightening some folks out:

Honey, presidents sign bills. Congresscritters vote on them. If you're confused you might check out this excellent video https://t.co/YuYS7XE2QN

— Beep Beep Yer Yas (@Yastreblyansky) January 19, 2023

And then there's Trump, bringing back the theory that he's just a lonely old hoarder, as if his document theft wasn't carried out by an army of staffers, and as if we hadn't learned anything about the case since he invented the story last summer—though I guess his supporters really haven't learned anything, since it's not reported on their media:

For the Record: January 6 Meets Mar-a-Lago

Posted this expansion of the January 1 post as a Twitter thread,  but I've messed up the threading in at least a couple of places. What follows is a more or less unformatted version.

Talking about mishandled classified documents, did I ever tell you about the time Mark Meadows stole a large number of photocopies of classified docs from the White House, some to give to well-known rightwing journalists, some for purposes unknown? On or about January 19 2021?

 **

Actually I did, in a blogpost of January 1 this year http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2023/01/narratology-new-on-mar-lago-documents.html, but that was more for the fun of scooping the real journalists who, I assumed, would be jumping on the story in the next couple of days. Only they didn't.

So I'm pushing it out On Here.

**

The material is basically from Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the J6 Committee of 5/17/22, just after she's been talking about Meadows improperly burning documents in his fireplace in 12/21, after discussions with Scott Perry about "election matters". https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041/pdf/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041.pdf 

**

Starting p. 44, Cheney turns the discussion to whether Meadows ever took any documents home, and on p. 46, gets more specific:

**

Point of Personal Privilege

 

"Photo op raid"—I can't tell whether they've really forgotten that the FBI's seizure of the stolen materials at Mar-a-Lago was carried out with the usual FBI discretion, and the reason we learned about it was Trump's immediate howls of preemptive rage; it was his publicity, not theirs. Or that they released the photo (documenting the proceedings with photos is part of their standard procedure) in self-defense, against the Republican insistence that Trump's theft of presidential documents was nothing but eccentric billionaire souvenir collecting, showing that, no, some of these documents were definitely not souvenirs, through media like TMZ.

Abolishing Meaning

"Theseus and the Minotaur", with the Athenian hero unspooling the thread from Princess Ariadne, tile design by Edward Burne-Jones, 1861, via Wikipedia.

OK, so as you probably know or at least won't be surprised to hear, after the end of his time as vice president Joe Biden got a gig—all right, Joe Biden got a sinecure—as a something-or-other professor, I think they call it "professor of practice", meaning not in fact an academic, at the University of Pennsylvania, though in fact not in Philadelphia but D.C., where he maintained an office (officially his own think tank, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement) from mid-2017 until he launched his presidential campaign in late April 2019, but it wasn't until early November 2022 that anybody thought to clean up the office and move his stuff out, and when they did (I'm vague about the "they", but they were working for the White House, not Penn, and included a couple of lawyers) they found a locked closet full of files, inspection of which revealed about 10 documents marked as classified; so they immediately called up the National Archives and Records Administration and made arrangements to have them picked up and taken where they belonged.

It sounds like they shouldn't have been there, but it also sounds like Biden didn't particularly know they were there. Classified documents do, apparently, get misplaced from time to time, as WaPo reports—

Legal experts say that it is not uncommon for some people who have security clearances to mishandle classified documents. But these situations are typically handled administratively, not criminally, because the criteria for prosecuting people who mishandle classified documents include proving that the person deliberately flouted rules for how to secure the materials.

—and it's normally not a very serious situation; one reason Donald Trump is under criminal investigation in the Mar-a-Lago case is that there is tons of evidence that he deliberately flouted the rules. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of a number of people who have not understood that:

Narratology: New on the Mar-a-Lago Documents

 

Happy New Year!

Hutchinson testified on May 17 that “boxes of documents on dollies” were delivered from the Intel Committee to Meadows, and that he copied them and gave some to people in the private sector. This was when she was describing how Meadows also burned documents in the fireplace.

— Diana Manister (@DianaCialino) December 31, 2022

I really wasn't planning to take on any new cases from the January 6 Committee releases, at least not right away. There's so much to read! And the interview transcripts aren't even searchable, at least this one isn't.  But Mark Meadows doing something funky—trafficking?—with classified documents in the White House was too much to resist, and I had to look. What kind of classified documents? What kind of folks in the private sector? What the hell?

Obviously I had to take a look, and I did find something that may be pretty significant, in regard to an issue we're already officially interested in, and literally nobody knows about it other than probably Liz Cheney and her colleagues on the Committee, who, if I'm getting this right, want us, or Jack Smith, to figure it out without their having to say it out loud. Serious, it looks an answer to some pretty big questions.

It's from the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony, as noted, and it seems to be a conversation about Meadows doing stuff with papers incuding throwing them into the fireplace, specifically things having to do with "the vice president's role on January 6th" and a conversation with Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania congressman at the center of the conspiracy to make Jeffrey Clark the attorney general and IMO the most likely candidate in the House for an indictment, and then it takes a kind of startling turn: