Trump's attempted document theft ... Missing pages from confidential files ... Trouble for former president's lawyers ... Patsy judge's flawed reasons ... State judges up for election in November ... Republicans working on the judicial stack ... From Our Man in Washington, Roger Fitch
"Plaintiff has no property interest in any Presidential records (including classified records) seized from the Premises. The Presidential Records Act provides ... that '[t]he United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records' ... Plaintiff [does not] offer any ... colourable argument that he has a property interest in any Presidential records seized ... Plaintiff's Motion, in fact, asserts that '[t]he documents seized at Mar-a-Lago ... were created during his term as President' ... precisely the types of documents that likely constitute Presidential records.
Because these records do not belong to Plaintiff, [he has] no right to have them returned. And because Plaintiff has no such right, this Court should not appoint a special master to review Presidential records for the purpose of entertaining potential claims of executive privilege ... the former President cites no case ... in which executive privilege has been successfully invoked to prohibit the sharing of documents within the Executive Branch." - US response, Trump v US
Even if Donald Trump escapes punishment for e.g, insurrection, he must be guilty of something: consider the example of the American gangster Al Capone, undone by Internal Revenue. While tax evasion is likely among Trump's countless crimes, his downfall may be the National Archives (NARA), wielding the Presidential Records Act.
After Trump left the White House, NARA discovered that important official papers belonging to the Archives were missing, and asked for their return. When the requested documents were not provided, but lied about ("only news clippings"), moved about and hidden, the Justice Department was called in.
After months of Trump obstruction, DOJ obtained a search warrant for Trump's hotel-home, Mar-a-Lago, and retrieved a sizable tranche of government papers, many secret and/or highly classified, that the ex-president had secreted and retained.
A damning affidavit supported the government's search, which yielded "sensitive" documents afterwards compared by Trump lawyers to "overdue library books".
American media initially stressed the "unprecedented" search by the FBI of (gasp) a former president's home, assuming some deference was due. That changed when 11,000 government records were found in Trump's possession and 90 empty folders, half of which were marked confidential.
What's actually unprecedented is the wholesale theft of government documents by an outgoing president, 320 of them classified. Sensitive government documents may have disappeared.
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