One point TPM Readers have asked again and again is this: why did Trump court all this trouble when he could have just xeroxed the documents and given the originals back? There are a lot of good and not good potential answers to that question. But as the Times notes here, DOJ investigators aren’t convinced he didn’t. The attestation that Trump and his lawyers had turned over all classified information also included a promise that no copies had been made of them. So those claims are in doubt now too.

A new article in the Post suggests that Trump lawyers Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran both now face significant legal jeopardy in their own right and are now off the case. The article gets to this point in a somewhat meandering way. But the gist is pretty clear. Notably and in character for Trump, his attorneys appear to be in more imminent legal jeopardy than he is.

In other Trump investigation-adjacent news today, election steal scheming attorney John Eastman’s lawyers think that he is “probably a target” of the Fulton County probe led by District Attorney Fani Willis, who is looking into Trump team efforts to overturn the election results in her state of Georgia.

Even Fox & Friends is struggling with the classified document fiasco at Mar-a-Lago.

Steve Doocey confronted Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) about it on this morning’s show and managed to sound momentarily reasonable:

I’m getting a late start this morning because I was up quite late trying to make sense of the various facts, claims, allegations and more contained in the DOJ’s latest filing. And yes, the photo … When I first saw the photo across my Twitter feeds I thought: Oh this is someone showing a photo of what highly classified documents look like, with their stamped and color coded jackets. Then after seeing it a number of times it hit me: wait, that’s a crime scene photo of Trump’s haul! Right down to the tacky carpet.

Our team will keep you up to speed on the details but there are a few points that caught my attention last night.

Go read the Justice Department’s filing or our summary of it here or just look at this darn photo, then consider this:

There’s been quite a lot of coverage in recent weeks of Republican anti-abortion diehards running away from their positions in light of the Dobbs backlash. There’s been particular attention to Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters who scrubbed the portion of his site focused on abortion. But until today I hadn’t seen just how total a change he now claims to embrace all while still claiming not to have changed his position at all.

As my colleague Kaila Philo reported earlier today, Secret Service Assistant Director Tony Ornato retired from the agency this week, leaving plenty of unanswered questions in his wake. The DHS inspector general’s office had reportedly been trying to get him to sit for an interview about matters related to the missing texts scandal; it’s unclear, now, whether that will happen.

There are two layers to recent intrigue surrounding Ornato. His role in whatever tf was going on with the missing Secret Service texts is, of course, one. But secondly, Ornato’s standing as a character of interest to the Jan. 6 committee increased 10-fold after Cassidy Hutchinson gave astonishing public testimony earlier this summer.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, who presided over its failed reform and subsequent collapse, has died at the age of 91. An immensely, immensely consequential life.

TPM Reader LS from Georgia …

Just to let you know I called Jon Ossoff’s office (Atlanta and DC), and got through. I guess nothing has changed. They said he supports The Women’s Health Protection Act, but won’t say what he would do regarding the filibuster. I explained I had 2 daughters with essentially no rights in Georgia. That we are unlikely to ever have 60 votes. But you know they are just taking the message.