I can't really remember which one of the Trump hangers-on who opined something on Twitter to the effect of "What if the documents Trump took to Mar-A-Lago had information that was exculpatory about the Russia investigation?" (If your Twitter-fu is better than mine--please help me dig up who that was. I thought it was Mulvaney, but that wasn't it.) And it struck me, that was just stupid.EXCLUSIVE: Trump told his White House team he needed to protect Russiagate documents ... which he called his 'evidence' of a deep state plot against him.https://t.co/MBHBkGWFcB
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) September 8, 2022
For one thing--there's the whole Senate Intelligence Report to contend with. We know the Russia investigation started with George Papadopoulos shooting his mouth off. We know that Trump constantly referred to the "Russia, Russia, Russia" thing (I for one, always hear "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" when I see that, but of course, I am a person of a certain age) as a "hoax", but then again, he thinks climate change is a hoax too, and no, it is very real.
(We don't really talk about how Hurricane Maria was Trump's "worse than Katrina" but I wish we would.)
I also remember AG Bill Barr, the latest truth-telling former Trump SOB flying around to Italy and elsewhere looking for exculpatory stuff to defend Trump on Russiagate, for whatever reason. And by the way, what have we heard from Durham, lately?
If there was anything at all exculpatory regarding Trump and Russia, he would have held 1) a press conference 2) a parade and 3) the nuts of anyone who shafted him to the fire. It doesn't make any sense that he would just ferret the stuff away at Mar-A-Lago, per his own folks' (well, Kash Patel, and he certainly a stable dude, right?) public statements, with a standing order to declassify, and say absolutely nothing about it at all.
If Trump had anything in his possession that somehow meant that Russia did not wage a digital campaign against Hillary Clinton and APT 29 did not hack the DNC and spill info through Wikileaks and that Roger Stone and other friends of the campaign weren't in touch with Assange, and Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity weren't spouting Russian disinfo talking points, well, boy, I dunno. That would surely be really different from the reality I know.
What makes more sense to me is, there is something in there tangential to Russia that actually screws him over that isn't even being talked about. (Every denial is a confession.) And he would really rather it not get looked at, which is why he "secured" it. But because he took it and it got seized, eventually everyone is going to look at it. Unless it's one of the missing docs that hasn't been recovered yet because it ended up somewhere other than Mar-A-Lago.
Which is why I don't care if subpoenas/search warrants are still ready for elsewhere in Trump's domain. TBH.
2 comments:
Just a thought, but Trump had his hands on these documents for nearly two years. I believe that anything really valuable to him was long ago taken out of the country, and out of the reach of our legal system. Nothing else would make any sense, and as stupid as Trump is about everything else, he never missed an opportunity to do something criminal. That would explain all the empty folders, and also makes it likely that we will never know the real damage he has done. Once again, he will escape consequences for the worst of his crimes.
For I know he could have been yeeting things out the backdoor while he was still in the White House. I think though, there are things he might want to keep close to his vest--anything good for extortion. Those stay under his eye. It's hard for me to believe he would have unloaded everything "saleable" just yet because I'm not sure how easy it is for him to do so. (I hope that after all his complaining about his campaign being "wire tapped!" he finally is under some sort of surveillance) and also there's the obstruction of justice stuff--things he might want buried for good. That he had over 30 cartons of stuff we know about tells me he might have been very greedy.
Some people can cover their tracks. He's a dinosaur--his tracks run deeper.
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