Every Lawyer’s Nightmare Client

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

 

In a sit-down interview broadcast on Fox News Channel, anchor Bret Baier pressed Trump on the details of his pending 37-criminal-count case involving the alleged mishandling of classified documents and obstruction of investigators’ work. Indeed, “pressed” may be too strong a characterization. Baier did little more than set the table with the claims alleged in the indictment, at which point the president rocketed off into a prolonged and ill-advised homily ostensibly aimed at establishing his innocence. In the process, however, he appeared to confirm many of the charges against him.

 

“You say on tape you can’t declassify,” Baier said. “So why have it?”

 

“That’s because I wasn’t president,” Trump shot back. “I never made any bones about that. When I’m not president, I can’t declassify.” So, Trump confirmed the details of the indictment alleging that he was aware the documents he reportedly bandied about before his guests were secret in nature and that he lacked the ability to declassify them once he was out of office.

 

But Trump took issue with the word “document,” repeatedly insisting “there was no document.” So, what were they? “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Trump insisted. “It may have been held up, or it may not. But that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se.”

 

In the recording transcribed in the indictment, Trump described the records he paraded around his Bedminster, N.J., club as “secret” and “highly confidential.” In his interview with Baier, however, he likened the documentation he retained to “newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles,” adding that he didn’t “think that I’ve ever seen a document from [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark] Milley” containing sensitive information pertaining to Iran. But regardless of how he would characterize the nature of the medium, Trump did confirm that its details related in some way to Iran. Moreover, he affirmed that the documents could have been “held up” amid the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) efforts to reclaim them.

 

But why didn’t Trump just hand over the documents when he was asked? Indeed, why didn’t the president release all the documents in his possession when he surrendered 15 boxes of presidential records in January 2022, as a statement signed by Trump’s lawyers and provided to the Justice Department falsely attested? “Because I had boxes,” Trump insisted. “I want to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out. I don’t want to hand that over to NARA yet.” Damningly, the former president added “And I was very busy, as you’ve sort of seen.”

 

Here, Trump appeared to corroborate the allegation that he withheld evidence from a grand jury. There are no “too busy” and “I don’t want to” clauses that allow targets of a federal subpoena to avoid compliance.

 

Pour one out for the former president’s beleaguered attorneys. “Even if this was not going to be the defense of Trump’s team, it now is,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. Navigating the pitfalls this client routinely creates for himself and his legal representation would be an impossible headache for even the most capable lawyer. In all but confirming the federal charges relating to obstruction, the president may have sealed his fate in court.

 

Moving on to the politics of the 2024 election, Baier asked Trump to play pundit — always a trap candidates are well advised to avoid — when he asked the former president how he planned to appeal to the suburban female voters who abandoned him in 2020 and cost him his reelection bid. But Trump rejected Baier’s premise.

 

“First of all, I won in 2020 by a lot, ok?” the former president asserted. “Let’s get that straight. I won in 2020.” There is little appetite to indulge that fantasy at the post-Dominion settlement Fox News Channel, and Baier pushed back. “That’s not what the votes show,” he replied. To this gentle admonition, Trump released a furious blizzard of tendentious and easily falsifiable allegations of voter fraud.

 

“You take a look at Truth the Vote, where they have people stuffing the ballot boxes on tapes,” he insisted. “Bret, you take a look at all of the stuffed ballots,” he advised. “You take a look at all of the things, including things like the 51 intelligence agents,” he continued. “FBI Twitter,” he inscrutably argued in what I assure you was a complete sentence. “All corrupt stuff, Bret.”

 

Baier confronted Trump with the numerous state-level recounts that failed to uncover any substantial voter fraud, to which Trump insisted that those were not “real recounts.” Trump said he is still seeking more recounts targeting states such as Wisconsin, which he claims have “practically admitted it was rigged.” At this point, Baier restated the original question: “So, this is how you’re going to tell that independent suburban voter. . . .” Trump assured his interlocutor that these grievances were not going to feature prominently in his campaign-trail themes. But, given the passion he reserves for re-litigating the 2020 race, that seems unlikely.

 

Finally, when asked how he might govern differently in a second term than he did in his first, Trump added contemplatively, “I would like to be less combative.”

 

Part two of Baier’s interview with the president will air tonight on Fox News Channel.

 

ADDENDUM: Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to put the best face on his sojourn to Beijing this week, in which he held “candid, substantive, and constructive” talks with Chinese officials. But observers could be forgiven for concluding that the trip was a failure. Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the determination that Blinken’s Chinese counterparts set him up to fail.

 

As human-rights activist Jennifer Zeng pointed out, the Chinese greeted Blinken upon his arrival with a muted response. This, she and other China observers maintained, was a deliberate effort to communicate to Blinken the Chinese Communist Party’s growing frustration with the United States.

 

The secretary of state was scheduled to meet with Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang and Wang Yi, the primary architect of China’s foreign policy as the director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office. The Chinese dangled the notion that Chinese president Xi Jinping could maybe, possibly make himself available to meet with Blinken, time permitting. But it wasn’t until Monday that Xi consented to a face-to-face . . . for all of 35 minutes.

 

It was “one of the shortest high-level meetings on record,” wrote Yale Law School’s Stephen Roach, who called the meeting a “diplomatic drive-by.” He added: “Consecutive translation cuts the actual exchange in half — leaving each less than 10 minutes of perfunctory speaking time.”

 

As National Review’s editorial on Blinken’s trip notes, the secretary was able to secure some perfunctory agreements with his Chinese counterparts pertaining to cultural exchanges, increased commercial flights, and the basis for a “working group” that will interdict the export of precursor chemicals for fentanyl to the United States. But Blinken was not able to secure assurances from his Chinese counterparts on one of the most urgent matters of mutual security: the lack of stable and robust military-to-military contacts between the United States and China.

 

“These military-to-military contacts are hugely important if we’re going to avoid an unintentional conflict, and that was only reinforced over the last couple of weeks,” Blinken said on Monday. How so? Blinken cited “incidents on the seas and in the skies that were really dangerous and, in our judgment, unprofessional.” Indeed. In the last several weeks alone, a Chinese fighter jet deliberately buzzed a U.S. warplane over the South China Sea, and a Chinese warship came within 150 yards of a U.S. destroyer in the Taiwan strait. But it was the incursion of a Chinese spy balloon into U.S. airspace in February — a violation of American sovereignty which Blinken conspicuously downplayed — that underscored how vital reliable lines of communication were and how dangerous their absence could one day become.

 

China’s provocative conduct is familiar. It’s the sort of signaling in which Russian naval and air assets engage over the skies of Syria and in the Black Sea. But the United States and Russia maintain reliable channels of direct military-to-military communication. Despite the fact that relations between Moscow and Washington haven’t been this chilly since the Cold War, those channels are still routinely utilized to reduce the prospects of miscommunication and facilitate deconfliction should an incident occur. Washington and Beijing do not have similar tools, and China has repeatedly rejected American overtures aimed at establishing them.

 

“It has been the People’s Republic of China’s decision to ignore, reject, or cancel multiple U.S. requests for senior-level communication,” read a May statement from the Pentagon. The Defense Department had been engaged in an effort to convince Secretary Lloyd Austin’s Chinese counterpart, Defense Minister Li Shangfu, to participate in bilateral talks, but Li rejected the request.

 

Li is the target of U.S. sanctions in relation to the 2018 transfer of Russian arms to China. In much the same way Xi conveyed with his blow-off, the Chinese view substantive talks as a concession that demands reciprocity. In Li’s view, a thaw in military-to-military relations should be accompanied with rewards — presumably including the lifting of sanctions on him and other Chinese officials.

 

Miscommunications happen. Misjudgments owing to a lack of credible information in a real-time conflict zone can create conditions that spiral out of control. Cascading cycles of retaliation and escalation arising from a mistake are a part of the literature all conflict theorists study. An accidental war is the stuff of nightmares, but it is a prospect that is kept at bay by the existence of unobstructed mechanisms for de-escalation.

 

China’s obstinacy ensures that the instruments designed to reduce ambiguity in a crisis will be unavailable to policy-makers in Washington and Beijing. And given the increasing proximity in which these countries’ respective naval and air assets operate, a crisis is coming.