Donald Trump, white supremacist and active threat to the security of the United States, on August 10, 2022 in New York City. Photo: James Devaney/GC Images (Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s coup attempt at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 got him banned from Twitter, which forced the former president to start his own social media company, Truth Social. And the US Justice Department should be incredibly grateful Trump still has a way to speak directly with the public, as the 45th president admitted to at least one serious crime last night on Truth Social.
Trump’s home in Florida was famously raided on August 8, when the Justice Department and the National Archives asked the former president for any classified documents taken from the White House, but only a handful were retrieved. And late Tuesday, a new court filing in the case included a photo the FBI found of Trump illegally showing several highly classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump tried to defend himself over the incident on Wednesday, sending out various messages on Truth Social that he apparently thought would acquit him. But one message specifically contradicts his legal team’s court filings and appears to have acquitted of a variety of offenses, including violations of the Presidential Records Act and obstruction of justice.
Trump’s post on Truth Social on Wednesday night:
There seems to be confusion as to the “picture” where documents were dumped on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, like this is what the FBI found when they broke into my house. Wrong! He took them out of the cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it seem like a big “discovery” to him. They dropped them, not me – very deceiving… and remember, we may not have had any representatives, including lawyers, during the raid. They were asked to wait outside.
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Screenshot: Satya Social
Why could this social media message be a big problem for Trump? To start, it’s a blunt acknowledgment that Trump not only knew he had classified documents in his possession, in violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, but that he knew where they were and how they were stored. it was done. And many lawyers said this on Twitter.
“Trump now says the documents weren’t on the floor like that. ‘They took them out of the boxes,’ he says. How does he know where they were kept?” Asked Tristan SnellA lawyer who previously worked on Trump’s fraud prosecuting Trump University while he was in the New York Attorney General’s office.
If Trump knew he still had classified documents, it would contradict a sworn statement from Trump’s legal team that everything was already handed over. The name of Trump’s legal representative sworn in that claim has been amended in the court filing.
The government’s court filing also stated that the classified documents, “were likely concealed,” and that, “there were attempts to obstruct the government’s investigation.” And Trump never bothered to argue against that point.
Second, Trump’s new Truth Social post makes clear that these documents could not have been planted by the FBI, an allegation that has been leveled repeatedly by Trump supporters on Fox News, Newsmax and OAN. The idea that documents could have been planted is not impossible, as we have seen a lot of videos showing police officers applying drugs in recent years thanks to the advent of body cameras. But let’s take the drug analogy further. Imagine Trump was accused of possessing heroin at Mar-a-Lago. Replace the word “documents” with “heroin needles” and you can see Trump admitting he knew exactly where they were and how they were arranged.
There seems to be confusion about “picture” where [heroin needles] Slowly thrown to the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my house. Wrong! He took them out of the cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it seem like a big “discovery” to him. They dropped ’em, not me – very deceiving
The problem has now become more apparent to Trump, as anyone with a little common sense can see.
Photo: US District Court for the Southern District of Florida
The second offense Trump could potentially be charged with is a violation of the Espionage Act. It is entirely possible that Trump was showing these documents to visitors, or in a more nefarious possibility, selling the documents to foreign governments. There is already evidence that Trump’s son-in-law received $2 billion from the Saudi government and no one really knows what Saudi got in exchange for his cash. According to everyone involved, it certainly wasn’t a smart investment. But Trump’s lawyers aren’t too worried about the espionage allegations. In fact, they are calling the law “worldly”.
“They themselves say in these papers that they filed … that it’s under the Presidential Records Act,” Trump’s attorney Elina Habba said on Charlie Kirk’s podcast on Wednesday, according to the Daily Beast.
“So what they did was try to criminalize Donald Trump like they always do. They got these three mundane methods: espionage and two other hindrances. And they’re trying to claim that some sort of criminal There is activity,” Habba continued.
Another defense of Trump’s actions has been that he has made all these documents public, but it is not going to last in court. For one thing, the president can declassify almost Any document he wants, but not some of the closest nuclear secrets. And from the very beginning there have been reports that at least some of these documents contained nuclear secrets.
But even if you want to believe that Trump somehow declassified these in his head, as some of his lawyers have tried to argue, it doesn’t work. The president has to declare the documents declassified and then mark them on each page with a line through “top secret” notation. Anyone who has obtained previously classified documents through the Freedom of Information Act is familiar with such documents as the one below. None of the documents in the photo taken by the FBI show any markings that indicate anything was declassified there.
A formerly classified government document, previously marked as “secret” by the US National Reconnaissance Office, before being released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2017. Screenshot: National Reconnaissance Office
There was a reasonable argument that Trump needed to be booted from Twitter because his neo-fascist language to supporters was a threat to the safety and security of the United States. But at this point, Trump’s social media activity could reasonably force the hand of the Justice Department that is clearly uneasy about making the unprecedented move to charge a former president with a crime.
Give Trump his Twitter account back, just for a few days. With any luck, Trump will convict himself so badly that he has no choice but to throw him in prison for the rest of his life. Or, at the very least, maybe we’ll get to know where Jimmy Hoffa’s body is buried or what happened in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1940s.
