Former president Donald Trump is facing the very serious prospect of being indicted for obstruction of justice and causing false statements to be made to the government. That is the upshot of a court submission filed by the Justice Department on Tuesday night, in response to the Trump camp’s belated motion for the appointment of a special master to review materials seized three weeks ago from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Last week, when an extensively redacted version of the affidavit supporting the Mar-a-Lago search warrant was released, I opined that “perhaps the most overlooked sentence” in the document was this one: “There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the PREMISES.” The government’s Tuesday night court filing bears that out.
The submission also illustrates that, while the affidavit remains substantially under wraps, we already know the gist of it (as I explained last week). Prosecutors begin with a factual recitation (pp. 2-13) that substantially echoes a letter written by Archivist Debra Seidel Wall to Trump’s counsel — covering events from the time Trump left office on January 20, 2021, through May 10, the date of Wall’s letter.
Moreover, we already knew that after Wall’s letter there followed (a) an initial grand-jury subpoena for classified documents, served on May 11; (b) a meeting at Mar-a-Lago on June 3, which, contrary to Trump’s public depiction of an amicable negotiation session between his lawyers and DOJ officials (into which Trump himself popped in), was actually compliance — or as it turned out, non-compliance — with a grand-jury subpoena in an active criminal investigation; and (c) a second grand-jury subpoena, served on June 22, for Mar-a-Lago surveillance video. These events dovetailed with the FBI’s interviews of Mar-a-Lago employees and Trump’s post-presidency staffers, as well as the bureau’s review of the surveillance video. In combination, these convinced the government of what it already suspected at the time of the June 3 meeting: Trump was lying about how much classified information he was hoarding, and about where he was hoarding it.
Consequently, even without the new submission, we already knew that the Justice Department believed the unprecedented execution of a court-authorized search warrant at the home of a former American president was fully justified because: (a) the government had exhausted other options, after not just 18 months of trying to reason with Trump but, especially, his flouting of a grand-jury subpoena (i.e., even though he knew things had been elevated to a criminal investigation, he nevertheless engaged in conduct punishable by imprisonment); (b) there was a high likelihood that Trump was continuing to direct the movement, concealment, and perhaps destruction of classified documents which, as the Trump camp’s June 3 machinations showed, the former president had no intention of surrendering to the government; and (c) there was a vital need for U.S. intelligence agencies to re-acquire any highly classified intelligence that had been mishandled (and was still being mishandled), in order to assess the damage that mishandling had done to national security.
No comments:
Post a Comment