Trump Charged With 37 counts of Espionage, Obstruction and related crimes

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

N.E.B.'s buddy Marcy has a good piece on the oddness of Trump's claim that this Classified Evening Briefing folder was just keepseek.

SOME PEOPLE HAVE SEX TOYS; TRUMP [CLAIMS HE] HAS EMPTY CLASSIFIED EVENING BRIEFING FOLDERS

[Voronwë the Faithful]

But as Marcy Wheeler says,

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This is also interesting.

This is even more interesting.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

More information about the new classified information that was found at Mar-a-Lago.

Per @LinkedIn, she was a “Coding Assistant” & “studied abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia from July-August of 2019”

Coincidence? I don't know.

ETA: Marcy Wheeler points out that she deleted the reference to studying in Russia after people pointed it out and screen-capped it.

[N.E. Brigand]

Washington Post: "Showdown before the raid: FBI agents and prosecutors argued over Trump."

We'd heard hints about this already, but some senior FBI field agents seem to have been trying to protect Donald Trump, arguing that instead of searching his home for the missing classified documents, the Dept. of Justice should just continue negotiating with Trump's attorneys for their return. In fact, some of the agents said they believed that Trump had already turned over all such documents by last summer.

I see a lot of people grumbling about FBI Director Christopher Wray in response to this news, but I'm not sure what he should have done differently. I would like to know a good deal more about the career of Steven D'Antuono, apparently the senior agent who was most reluctant to search Mar-a-Lago. He'll never be charged with anything, but it does rather look as if he was aiding and abetting Trump's possibly criminal activities. He (unexpectedly?) stepped down in November. D'Antuono also seems to have played a key role in the investigation of January 6th; did he slow-walk that process to help Trump as well?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I was coming here to post about that. It is interesting and I think probably true for the most part, but I take anything with Devlin Barrett's name in the byline with a grain of salt.

[N.E. Brigand]

Independent journalist Murray Was reports that:

Months after he had left office, former president Donald Trump, directed his former chief-of-staff, Mark Meadows to leak highly classified government records regarding Peter Strzok, the former Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, to the press. In the final days of Trump’s presidency, Meadows had removed the classified files from the White House, which Trump and Meadows believed would discredit Strzok.

Was says he has three sources, but no other outlet has confirmed this story yet.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This is quite interesting.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And then there is this.

[N.E. Brigand]

CNN reports that one of Donald Trump's attorneys, Evan Corcoran, has been ordered to testify to a grand jury in the documents investigation after a judge determined that the Dept. of Justice had presented sufficiently convincing evidence that some communications between Trump and Corcoran met the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

As is common, the headline is misleading, though the article gets it right. Corcoran has already testified to the grand jury but refused to answer certain questions claiming attorney client privilege. What Judge Howell has reportedly ordered (in her last days at the chief judge of the D.C. District Court) is that Corcoran answer those questions. Presumably, Corcoran will appeal to the Court of Appeals though none of the reporting that I am seeing is saying that.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't know if this is really true, but if so it would be pretty extraordinary.

[N.E. Brigand]

Following up on V's posts from Friday and Saturday: it seems that one of Beryl Howell's last acts as Chief Judge of the D.C. district court was to find in a sealed (but leaking) filing on Friday that Special Counsel Jack Smith's office, as ABC reports, has "presented compelling preliminary evidence that former President Donald Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about his retention of classified materials after leaving office" and that because of these "criminal violations ... attorney-client privileges invoked by two of his lawyers could therefore be pierced." It seems that Howell ordered one of Trump's lawyers, Evan Corcoran, to turn over "handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal audio recordings," and she ordered another Trump lawyer, Jennifer Little, to testify.

Trump's lawyers appealed that decision, and today, a panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals has temporarily stayed Howell's ruling, but perhaps not for long: Trump's team has been ordered to make an additional filing by midnight tonight (90 minutes from now) and the Special Counsel's office has been ordered to reply just six hours after that: yes, by 6 a.m. on Wednesday.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

You beat me to it; I was just coming to post about this. That briefing schedule by the D.C Circuit Court is pretty stunning.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Not surprising given the shockingly short briefing schedule, but this is still huge.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I had to make sure that this wasn't some kind of April Fool's joke.

[RoseMorninStar]

Why doesn't he just say, "I'm not a crook."

There is a reason we now have the Presidential Records Act (1978) and it applies to Trump & the records of his administration.