Forever in Debt to Your Priceless Advice

 

CNN reports that Trump began taking legal advice from Tom Fitton of right-wing activist group Judicial Watch shortly after he first returned the 15 boxes to the National Archives in January -- and that Fitton told him he shouldn't have turned over any docs in the first place. pic.twitter.com/KwK26VDYGt

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 25, 2022

Trump took legal advice from the photogenic head of the group Judicial Watch, that somehow is not a CourtTV fan club, even though he is not a lawyer he just...works out a lot? Because all I know about Tom Fitton is he is a fit one--he has bared arms and they are some real guns.  Fitton, rather like myself, has a BA in English.  Unlike myself, he told Trump to not give stolen top secret documents back to the National Archives. I would have told him to do that, because the law isn't really hard to parse. The docs are the property of the US Government, and ex-presidents aren't still USG. The general idea that former presidents can utilize NARA docs seems to mean they still reside with NARA and rely a bit on an existing clearance.

Trump was impeached for an attempted insurrection and to be a whole bitch about it, was a security threat from 2015 on because of the entirely correct and not a whole witch hunt counter-intelligence investigation into his Russian and other international and financial complications. He is denied foreign security briefings for damn good reasons. 

I kind of want to believe even Larry Klayman might have told him to do that. I dunno. He's also a putz. But at least he was a lawyer. 

Anyways, Trump doesn't have executive privilege.  He doesn't have some kind of right to retain these docs, and despite his whinging, he shouldn't get them back, either. 

I'm not lawyer, but if the argument rests on whether he had the right to have the documents versus whether the US Government had the rights to take the documents, he is verily screwn, because it looks to me like the documents were not actually his. They were ours. 

But I think it's just great that he listened to some central casting loosely law-affiliated Right-wing personage he probably saw on tv to make a potentially legally fatal decision, because this is so totally Trump as a totally Trump thing. 

He really is a berk.