You’ve no doubt seen the Wall Street Journal story on Trump’s lewd and innuendo-rich 2003 birthday card to Jeff Epstein. That speaks for itself. To me what speaks more loudly is what appears to have been an all-out war from the White House to get the Journal to kill the story. Just after 8:30 p.m. ET the President posted a jangling rant attacking Rupert Murdoch and Journal editor Emma Tucker, insisting he’ll sue, blaming Hillary and Obama. An hour and a half later, he posted a more succinct version of the same post, again claiming the letter was “FAKE”, threatening to sue, yada. In between those two posts he did yet another post clearly intended to appear to be Trump finally losing his patience and insisting that all information be made public. Only it wasn’t that at all. Trump said he was asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetrated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”
There are three problems with this.
First, grand jury testimony is secret and unauthorized release of it is a serious crime. Judges can under some circumstances allow the release of grand jury testimony. But they rarely do. So “subject to Court approval” makes this whole statement basically meaningless. At most it’s a way to blame some judge for the coverup.
Second, agreeing to release only the information Trump or Bondi find “pertinent” makes the whole thing not only meaningless but laughable. My defense attorney will allow the jury to see all the pertinent information from the investigation!
Third and most importantly, no one has ever talked about grand jury testimony. It’s not even clear what testimony he’s referring to. To the extent anyone knows just what the government has, the focus has always been on materials confiscated from Epstein during the 2019 investigation and especially what was taken from his residence and safe when he was arrested. So the whole “grand jury testimony” thing is a silly red herring.
Trump spouting BS is not surprise to us. What gets my attention is that this supposed throwing down of the gauntlet — that’s it! release the files! — is something anyone with a basic understanding of the case and the law would know was meaningless. So the half life of this latest effort to get ahead of the story is maybe an hour. It’s of a piece with the last 10 days — desperate, hapless, self-incriminating and accelerating on each one of those fronts. You have to be really desperate to try to put out the fire with a gambit that can’t work for more than a few hours.
There’s that old Watergate era yarn that the coverup is worse than the crime. This is almost never true. It only seems to be the case sometimes because the coverup you got caught for was at least partially successful. The underlying crime stays hidden, which was the whole point all along. People seldom commit felony coverups over misdemeanor crimes. You do the coverup because the cost of getting caught for the underlying crime is often existential. And the coverup usually works, at least partially.
In this case, I suspect Trump won’t be exposed for crimes, and if they’re crimes, they’re probably now unchargeable. But the same basic logic applies.
Big scandals usually first come into view as black holes do. You can’t see them directly. But they exert a mammoth gravitational pull on the things around them. People start doing inexplicable things, acting in what seem like weird and self-destructive ways; people run for the hills for no clear reason or any logical explanation. Like a black hole, the gravity of the scandal has this distorting effect on people and things around it and you can infer the scope and scale by those effects even though you can’t see it directly. This is one of those cases. I don’t know what “it” is. But its force is staggering. It looks like Trump’s actions are self-destructive and inexplicable. But the most straightforward explanation is that these actions are the only option he has. He’s trapped and he’s desperate and doesn’t have any better options.
What makes me finally start to think Trump might really be in trouble — like trouble in a way we haven’t seen in the Trump era, in a possibly existential way — is that he’s doing his same old thing but it’s not working. “It’s fake. Obama did it. I’ll sue.” Yada yada yada. But none of it is working. And despite that, he keeps doing the same thing that isn’t working at a higher volume. He doesn’t have any second angle. The “release all the (none of the) documents” ploy is just another version of the same. He’s trying to fast-forward the thing that already didn’t work — something that only makes it more obvious that he’s lying and that actually releasing everything is impossible for him. (Only that can explain why the current spectacle is somehow his better option.) Each time he does it, he just underlines how damaging the information must be — how much he fears it. So the water to put out the fire is actually just gasoline to make it bigger. Everything is accelerating. The whole story is just Trump testifying against himself in TrumpSpeak.