By Jeffrey Blehar
Saturday, June 10, 2023
Donald Trump was federally indicted on Thursday; the indictment was unsealed on Friday afternoon. The charges — thirty-one counts of willful retention of classified national-security information, five counts on obstruction of justice, and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice — pertain to material Trump took from the White House after his presidency, stored in Mar-a-Lago, and refused to return. I will spare you any further prelude because I’m in no mood for it after reading through this mess — and neither will you be once we’re done.
The indictment can be found here. Come and see. Come one, come all, and read it. The text is lucid, the case is made with a minimum of jargon, and it hits like multiple icepick blows to the skull. Do not willingly keep yourself ignorant of its enormity because you would prefer to huddle in a tortoise-shell defensive crouch. There aren’t merely claims, there are evidentiary submissions, including remarkable photographs and excerpts of recorded conversations.
Trump is nailed dead to rights, and what matters most of all is that it’s not on some technical offense. What he was doing, before only a physical raid on Mar-a-Lago stopped this madness, turns out to have been less an act of mere carelessness than an active threat to United States national security, one fueled solely by Trump’s demented behavior and sense of self-entitlement.
The case begins the day Trump left office with boxes and boxes of items—some entirely personal but many highly classified—and took them to his Mar-a-Lago estate. The third paragraph of the indictment is damning as to the nature of the material Trump absconded with: “The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities, of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” Those are not mere keepsakes.
Perhaps your first intuition is that the government is inflating its charges, making a mountain out of a molehill. (The U.S. government has a notorious over-classification problem, after all.) Not so here. Lest you think Trump is being indicted for something like sneaking the CIA World Factbook out of the Oval Office, note that Trump himself (always his own worst enemy) helpfully made clear just how serious the material he stole was by consenting to be recorded showing them off and talking about them. The battle plans and highly classified maps of war zones are just the ones we know about, and that’s only because Trump was acting simultaneously like the star of a comedy of errors and A Confederacy of Dunces.
And dunces these people are. The tale of how irresponsibly Trump and his underlings stored these documents (which he mindlessly regarded as his personal “papers”) takes up the remarkable first segment of the indictment. From an open ballroom to a bathroom, to a shower, to a storage closet by a liquor cabinet, Trump was directing his people to lug all these boxes of classified information around to comically insecure and high-traffic areas. Forget about reasonable security, forget about potential exposure to foreign agents; we’re just lucky nobody accidentally urinated on America’s Iranian counterstrike plan during the years 2021–22.
Trump even waved top-secret battle plans against Iran around in a random conversation with journalists while complaining about General Mark Milley, his (admittedly incompetent) former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In so doing, the former president actually said out loud that what he was doing was illegal because the documents were highly classified and he couldn’t declassify them anymore.
There is a moment in the indictment, a recorded conversation between Trump and a staffer, that must be preserved here for posterity, because it is his legal epitaph:
TRUMP: This totally wins my case, you know
STAFFER: Mm-hm.
TRUMP: Except that it is, like, highly confidential.
Caught on tape destroying the legal argument he has been content to farm out to his loudest defenders for months: That’s our Trump.
***
The former president’s illegal retention and comically insecure storage of classified documents that he made a point of randomly sharing in order to impress friends or complain about enemies is well established by the indictment. But that of course is only half of the indictment, the other half pertaining to what Trump did after the federal authorities became aware of his acts. This is the point where the obstruction and conspiracy charges begin, my friends. Per the document, Trump first asked one of his attorneys to aver to the feds that he had no classified documents. But when his attorney said it would be necessary to search the premises in order to certify to the FBI that Trump indeed held no classified information, the former president then explicitly directed a flunky to move boxes full of classified information from their unsecure storage space at Mar-a-Lago to his home on the property so that his own attorney wouldn’t find out he was lying about them. It is an almost comically textbook conspiracy case.
I know how Trump’s supporters, and even many otherwise non-aligned Republicans will look at this. They will see this indictment and immediately think of Hillary Clinton and the pass she got for her at-least equally criminal — and perhaps worse — “private server” scandal of 2016, the one which arguably destroyed her presidential candidacy. I can’t blame them; I thought of it too, because I recognize full well that the selective enforcement of the law is a vice both of political partisans and the permanent state overall.
But I refuse to be damned by James Comey’s original sin. Hillary Clinton should have gone to jail for what she did with her server; she skated because she is more practiced as an attorney and lifetime politico in concealing her crimes. (Remember: Always use BleachBit, and wipe with a cloth afterwards.) Of course, she also got off because — to grant the point made by Trump’s defenders — a system she’d bought off over the years was always going to treat her with kid gloves relative to an outsider like Trump. (Our consolation is that she will forever be remembered as the presidential candidate so loathed by Americans that they chose Donald Trump instead.)
And yet I was far more amenable to this selective-enforcement argument before I actually read through this indictment. Imagine yourself in the shoes of special counsel Jack Smith for a moment. You are brought onto this case to investigate potential misdeeds involving Donald Trump and classified information, and this is what you turn up: Not only did the former president intentionally steal some of America’s most critical national-security secrets for his private amusement and store them in recklessly insecure ways, he attempted to conceal possession of them and later refused to return them. It’s not simply that he broke the law, as in past-tense; he was continuing to break the law, and in ways that were dangerous as well as contemptuous. (I suspect Trump was treating this back-and-forth with the feds like “just another hard-nosed business negotiation,” and not an ongoing national-security crisis of his own making.)
At that point, you have to prosecute. Trump’s lawbreaking in this case simply boggles the mind with its recklessness and arrogance, even more so than what he did during the run-up to January 6. If Trump is so far gone in his dotage that he’s sharing classified war-zone maps of Afghanistan with Kid Rock in order to impress him (yes, it seems like it actually happened, it’s in the indictment, albeit redacted), you have to move to stop him immediately. Because if you don’t, it is going to happen again.
This also turns the Hillary Clinton question right back around on Trump, who was happy to lead chants of “Lock her up!” on the dais in 2016 (yet notably declined to prosecute her in 2017). Here in the indictment, in private, he instead praises Hillary Clinton and her legal team’s skill in concealing crimes:
[Hillary’s attorney], he was great, he did a great job. You know what? He said, he said that it — that it was him. That he was the one who deleted all her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments. And he was great. And he, so she didn’t get in any trouble because he said he was the one who deleted them.
Read that. That is the voice — unmistakably Trump’s — of a happy, willing, and witting criminal. His primary objection to Hillary is personal. (She was in his way.) But her dishonesty, her indifference to the rule of law? That is the gangster standard Donald Trump will tell you himself, at least off the record (and now in federal indictments), that he has always aspired to embody. For his benefit, not yours. Or America’s.
It is your choice whether to support him in the 2024 campaign or not.
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