By
Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday,
June 27, 2023
On June
8, Donald Trump was indicted on 37 federal counts related to his removal of
classified material from the White House after his presidency. For those
unfamiliar with the details, this is an
adequate enough summary. What matters for the present purposes is that the indictment was an
extremely serious one and contained significant evidentiary submissions,
including photographs and transcripts of recorded conversations wherein Trump
was alleged to have revealed both the existence and some of the contents of
classified information to others.
Last
night, on CNN, one of those recorded conversations was aired
on Anderson Cooper 360. It somehow plays, in its full context, even worse than
the excerpts included in the indictment. Per CNN, we find out now that the tape
comes from an interview Trump willingly recorded with the two writers working on former chief of
staff Mark Meadows’s “autobiography.” (Let that last bit sink in for a moment.)
He was in the midst of griping about General Mark Milley, and then to prove his
point about how much of a hypocrite Milley is, does something stupid himself:
whips out the United States military’s attack plan against Iran in case of war,
a document submitted to Trump under Milley’s name as chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. He then is heard paging through the document, quickly adding
“this is off the record” because the documents are “highly confidential, secret
. . . this is secret information.” Later, he laments that “as president I could
have declassified it, but now I can’t.”
To put
it mildly, it’s not a good look for him. Trump’s reaction to the CNN segment
this morning was predictable in its own way:
The Deranged Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, working in conjunction with
the DOJ & FBI, illegally leaked and “spun” a tape and transcript of me
which is actually an exoneration, rather than what they would have you believe.
This continuing Witch Hunt is another ELECTION INTERFERENCE Scam. They are
cheaters and thugs!
I
realize what folly it is to attempt to read the mind of a man like Trump’s, but
I take his claim of “exoneration” to mean that he is exonerated in the
particulars of his political beef with Mark Milley. Or perhaps he instead would
argue that he is exonerated of having actually divulged the particulars of the
Iran attack plan to the people in the room.
Donald
Trump, however, has not been accused of either of these things. Nobody cares
about his penny-ante issues with Milley, and while the fact that Trump is
playing fast and loose with state secrets in casual conversation is repulsive,
it is not charged here. The charges instead are (1) retention of documents (2)
obstruction of justice and (3) conspiracy to obstruct justice. The recording is
key evidence because it establishes Trump’s awareness that he was knowingly in
the business of retaining highly classified information, that the
information was indeed classified, and that he could not
declassify it at this point. But this recording also lays the groundwork for
obstruction and conspiracy because it immediately eliminates any innocent
explanation for his refusal to return them.
This is
why crying “leak,” as Trump and his defenders are predictably doing, is
handwaving nonsense. First of all, the provenance of the recording is by no
means established. The audio CNN acquired may have come from Jack Smith’s
people, but it just as easily could have come from the journalists who taped it
in the first place or any number of intermediaries between the two. But even if
it came hand-delivered from the Justice Department itself, so what? Who leaked
it is immaterial. The words were in the indictment already; this merely
confirms the recording’s authenticity beyond a doubt and shuts down any claim
that it was quoted out of context.
Trump
cries about a witch hunt, but to mount a “elite persecution” defense of him is
to stubbornly refuse to acknowledge how every act in this case — which, it must
be remembered, created an ongoing national-security crisis — was a
self-inflicted wound. Trump stole some of America’s most highly sensitive
national-security secrets to keep as trophies and score-settling “receipts.” He
then refused to return them, and in fact sought to move and conceal their
presence from government investigators. Nobody compelled him to do any of these
transparently illegal things.
And
nobody compelled him to be so careless and stupid, either: You know who didn’t
record Donald Trump showing off classified information? The federal government,
that’s who. The man who agreed to that was none other than Donald Trump. And
yet, with full knowledge he is being taped and full knowledge
that he is about to discuss extremely classified material, he blunders onward.
There is a moment in the interview, before Trump begins spilling state secrets
to settle personal beefs, where he pathetically says “this is off the record,”
as if one can skirt the problems with revealing classified information to
acquaintances by a quick “so I can trust you guys, right?”
It
reveals a lack of discretion surprising even for him. Legally, we have learned
nothing we did not already know from the indictment. What we have learned with
the new context is that Trump’s need to win an argument or score a point is so
all-consuming that he’s willing to whip out classified information that he
keeps stored loosely on his desk in order to do it. “Look at this,” he says
with a clear hint of pride, papers rustling as he flips through the document
for his audience, “these were the papers! This was done by the military and
given to me!” The fact that Donald Trump believes they were given to him
personally, as opposed to the office of the President of the United States,
explains rather eloquently why Jack Smith had to put a stop to this madness.
No comments:
Post a Comment