Let’s imagine that an investor has 100 million cash, and a gambling license. A 100 million dollar casino in the right place is a “license to print money.”
If that same investor has to borrow a billion dollars using junk bonds, that “license to print money” may not actually cover the interest payments.
I haven’t scrolled back so I don’t know if people mentioned it…
BUT…
Even if those documents were declassified by him as president, Biden reclassified them when he became president, and Donald doesn’t have the ability to declassify them again as he’s not president. It seems like people are missing this key fact.
It’s simpler than that.
There’s no proof Trump ever declassified those documents. NONE whatsoever, and Trump’s own lawyers knew it. That’s why they’re trying to delay as much as possible, hoping Cannon can throw them another bone.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes brought up a good point: a GOP Rabblerouser Tom Fitton, who’s NOT a lawyer, but runs an org called Judicial Watch, was the guy who advocated the idea that Trump owned EVERYTHING and should NOT give ANYTHING to the National Archives. Trump’s own lawyers had warned him over his entire term such idea is BS. Trump didn’t give a **** and now it’s coming to bite him in the ass. Hayes said it best… Trump usually has a sense of self-preservation that knows just how far to push things to stay barely legal. Seems Tom Fitton’s advice had finally pushed Trump over the edge into “definitely illegal”.
So… in general, a question for any lawyers here. In the event that a court actually ends up in the epistemic state of “The prosecution proved the defendent committed exactly one of two crimes, but can’t differentiate between them,” what actually happens?
My naive thinking would be that neither can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, so a conviction on either could be vulnerable to an appeal, and then protection from double jeopardy would prevent getting a conviction for the other.
Here’s the Hill saying the same thing:
Trump began taking calls from Tom Fitton, the president of the group, soon after the National Archives confirmed it obtained 15 boxes of records from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property earlier this year.
The Archives reportedly asked the Justice Department (DOJ) to investigate after it received the boxes, some of which contained classified information.
Fitton told Trump that providing the boxes to the Archives was a mistake and the records belonged to Trump, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Fitton said Trump should not provide any additional records if the Archives came back for more. He reportedly cited a 2012 case that Judicial Watch was involved in that he said gave Trump the authority to do what he wanted with records from his time in the White House.
One source told CNN that Trump requested Fitton brief his attorneys on the legal argument.
So basically Tom Fitton got to Trump’s ear, “Everything you had a hand in is ‘personal’, so you don’t have to give them anything. Those documents are all yours, classified or not.”
I am dying (figuratively) to find out what was that 2012 case that Fitton was talking about that he based this entire thing on. I am surprised NONE of the major networks have tried citing it yet or have talking heads rate its utility in Trump’s defense.
Bet you it sounds like SovCit psychobabble.
The people keeping T afloat often make me do a double take… “that guy remembers to breathe on his own?”
Historically a President can just declassify things at will and it is, so if he says he did, there’s no way to prove he didn’t and there’s no way to prove he’s lying. But even then, it doesn’t matter, because after he stopped being president he didn’t have the right to declassify things and he didn’t have the security clearance (because presidents and congresscritters don’t need security clearances) to have those Biden Presidency Classified docs.
The problem is that he hasn’t even provided a simple witness to the declassification. Normally, declassifying documents is a painful and bureaucratic process. Trump doesn’t seem to understand when you say a thing you need to have others see it that will either back him up and thus invalidate this case or have a paper trail that confirms it happened (another thing it seems that Trump doesn’t like to do even before being President). When you’re in government, it’s better to make a paper trail that muddies the waters or clarifies your position as both are an advantage and not a danger as someone like Don thinks it is.
It is almost as if running the government like a privately held business was not entitely optimal after all.
Historically a President can just declassify things at will
That may apply to even Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential Documents, but it doesn’t apply to SCI classified stuff. SCI info must be stored at SCIF (special facility) and Mar-whatever ain’t it. That’s a violation in itself.
Not to mention a lot of documents may be covered by OTHER sort of restricted access provisions, not just their own classification (or lack thereof) such as anything related to nuclear stuff.
That argument only goes so far. And Trump’s lawyer had yet to play that card… or ANY card in from of Master Dearie.
Even if he did, the guy has the memory of a goldfish. He probably couldn’t recall it if he tried.
Am I understanding the catch 22 correctly here? Is it that if he claims to have declassified them he has to acknowledge that he knows he intentionally retained them illegally?
Plus, declassification isn’t a wave-your-wand kind of thing, it’s a page-by-page administrative process.
The process of declassification requires that every page that previously had Classified markings (there are Classified markings on every page of every classified document) must now say ‘Declassified’ and provide the exact date and by whom the document was declassified.
Thus if the documents still say Classified on them, it doesn’t matter what incantation T*p claims to have made over them. They’s CLASSIFIED.
IANAL, but here’s my take:
Since possession of many of these documents is itself a crime, (regardless of whether they were declassified, by the way) the only thing the DoJ needs to prove is that 45 possessed them. That’s the crime right there.
In addition, from the documents that were filed and the strange events in the intelligence community around early 2021, the government may also have evidence that some of these documents or intelligence that was only in these documents turned up in the hands of hostile foreign powers. That ups the ante from light espionage charges to heavy treason charges.
I agree, that seems like the answer in this case. That’s why I tried to frame my comment as a hypothetical.
I think the key is, the defense doesn’t determine the charges. The prosecution does. They are only going to go to court with charges they can prove. The defense could argue (I suppose…) that the defendent shouldn’t have been charged with A but rather with B. But the prosecution doesn’t have to go along with that and the defense would essentially be providing evidence towards the defendant’s guilt either way. And any reasonable judge will sternly remind the defense that proving their client did other crimes does not make for a defense against the actual charges.
So I don’t see how the hypothetical would actually come into play.
Fair enough, thanks!
Maybe transactional. Maybe so he can sit in an office and have the secret documents and declare out loud he is still the president, and shuffle the documents around, and maybe look at the pictures in them.
Lets not get too far ahead of ourselves (aka please don’t jinx it!). He has been charged, not convicted, and for sure not been given an appropriate sentence. So it could be like Capone’s tax evasion conviction, or it could be like his first impeachment. Oh, or second. Maybe third? So much has happened, was he impeached two times or three?
It is possible, as much as I feel he took them so he could LARP still being important, sure.
I don’t know enough about how classified documents work. If you are in possession of a declassified document (or a never classified document) and it becomes classified is that “all copies in existence”, or “just the ones under control of the classifying agency”?
In other words when Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman were about to publish their paper on public key cryptography could the government have classified it & made it illegal for them to present the work?
Or is this a narrower power, only copies the federal government has can be classified?
Or somewhere in between, they can classify any work product of the federal government, so a declassified document can be reclassified and it applies to a copy that was “out in the wild” while declassified?
Historically as in “at some point before the Obama administration when a process was put into place”?
Historically as in “not at any point when Trump was the head of the executive branch”?
