Members-Only Article
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.
We know that really all of Trump’s after-the-fact explanations and justifications are nonsense, his magical carte blanche declassifications, empty claims of executive privilege and more. But there’s something a bit more specific that is worth drawing out. One of the points the government makes in its filing last night is that Trump and his representatives never made any of these claims during the long tug-of-war that got him to this point. One of their points was that in many cases the clock already ran out on his ability to make such claims. It’s too late for that.
That crystallized for me an essential point. Over the last 18 months Trump consistently resisted engaging in any of the statutory processes designed to deal with disputes of this kind. He and his representatives didn’t make a case that he was entitled or allowed to possess these documents. He tried to hide the fact that he had them at all. This usually amounted to denial and delay but sometimes escalated to comical games of cat and mouse.
It gets very hard to make sense of just what Trump’s aims or goals were with all of this, especially because a lot of this seems more instinctive than considered. Having the stuff is the power and he wants to be powerful. So he keeps it. And he hides it from whoever comes looking for it and whoever might take it from him. It’s on par with reported instances of his taking documents from briefers and refusing to give them back or tearing up documents and flushing them down the toilet.
The upshot of this is that he didn’t want to make claims or engage in a process because there weren’t any claims he could make. He just wanted to keep what he had. The process dragged out because the people in government are not or were not really equipped to deal with a former President refusing to relinquish or even admit having highly classified documents that are the property of the U.S. government.
