Okay, so: Why? Why did he do it? What was Trump’s motive? Maggie Haberman asks this most important question in the Times and can’t come up with anything more than the usual infantile: Those papers are mine. They’re my toys and you can’t play with them. Is this a plausible theory? Absolutely. Is it satisfying? Absolutely not. This is Life With Trump: You keep thinking that someone is going to nail him and every shot taken—every case brought—glances off the Teflon Gilt Body Armor.
In this case, here’s what I was hoping: That Trump would be charged with espionage. Full stop. That he would be caught sharing the documents with one of his dictator pals—Putin, optimally. Barring that, that he would be caught using the documents to aggrandize his business interests. Such charges may emerge, but they haven’t yet. And until they do: advantage Trump. Until they do, Trump supporters will be able to say: What’s the big deal? He thought they were his papers. And other Republicans will have to say: This is more Deep State chicanery. Especially the candidates running “against” Trump, like Nikki Haley, who tweeted: “This is not how justice should be pursued in our country. The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics. It’s time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.” Leave the guy alone, the candidates say…and let us try to perform a maximum degree of difficulty dive: a backwards three-and-a-half-gainer-with-a-twist. Let us try to beat him without taking him on.
Are these charges serious? Undoubtedly, but it depends on who you ask. If you are an intelligence specialist like The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, you are appalled by what Trump did:
Normally, when there is spillage of classified material—and such events are common, including during presidential transitions—it’s treated much like the spillage of toxic waste: Even if it’s an accident, everyone involved must cooperate to find the source of the spill, evaluate the amount of danger, and contain and clean the area. What Trump has already admitted to doing—taking classified documents and then defying the U.S. government’s repeated demands to return them—is like driving off with a truckload of toxic chemicals, splashing them around, and then, when the guys in the hazmat suits show up, telling them he had every right to dump out the barrels on his own property and that they can go take a hike.
Yeah, well. Even if you share Nichols’ alarm, as I do, it will be hard to convince Trump supporters, Republicans and the swath of Americans necessary to turn this into a major electoral problem for Trump. And if you’re the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which desperately wants to get rid of Trump, the legal case, sadly, doesn't seem open and shut:
But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents. [Emphasis mine].
This means we’re back in the familiar Trump tangle: lots of smoke, minimal fire. Lots of playground bravado: Oh, so you Deep State Archives People say that I have to give back my documents, sezwho? If this case amounts to no more than that, advantage Trump. If it isn’t adjudicated before the 2024 presidential election, advantage Trump.
Let’s put this in context for a moment: On January 6, 2021, Trump tried to overthrow the government of the United States of America. And he’s going to skate on that, too. (Although Jack Smith is investigating that as well.) The man’s greatest skill, as I’ve written before, is to stay one step ahead of the sheriff. He has a preternatural ability to bend the law to the point of breaking, but he never cracks it in two. He never says to the January 6 crowd: Go on down to the Capitol and overthrow the government. He says to the Proud Boys: “Stand back and stand by.” Stand Back absolves him of a truckload of evil intent. Stand By means: ignore the first part. He is a genius at the micro-laser-slicing of baloney, tip-toeing the rhetorical tightrope. And if you want to charge him with something that isn’t a flat-out doozy: advantage Trump.
The litigation left—and intelligence specialists like Tom Nichols—will respond: this secret records case is a doozy. There’s even a smoking gun: Trump’s admission on tape that the Iran attack document was top secret and could not be declassified. So he knew that he was spreading state secrets. So what? It’s a detail of implementation. Too technical for public consumption. They were Deep State secrets, anyway.
Does that mean the government should not have pursued this case? It couldn’t not. This was a more flagrant abuse than the Stormy Daniels hush money. You can’t have folks, even former presidents, hauling off truckloads of state secrets. This could have compromised national security. Indeed, it may have: What if Trump leaked the Iran battle plan to his business partners, the Saudis? What if, in one of the many conversations not recorded, he told some Russian guests the details of our nuclear strategy? Or, you’ve seen the movie: A foreign intelligence service get a secret operative hired on the kitchen staff at Mar A Lago. The documents are kept near the liquor store room. Easy peasy.
I am sympathetic to the argument that we can’t allow this guy to keep violating the law in ways too complicated for his supporters to understand. I am also sympathetic to the argument that you can’t use the presidency to benefit your family’s businesses. The Saudis gave Jared and Ivanka $2 billion, and that was just for starters. But that abuse isn’t going anywhere in the court of public opinion, either. And I suspect that Trump’s “find me the votes” pressure in Georgia will be seen as negligible by his supporters—and captives—as well.
We are left, then, where we were before. Trump in charge of the story. Trump in charge of the presidential campaign narrative. Trump Teflon in the eyes of his supporters. Disgrace is piled upon disgrace upon disgrace. His traitorous filth stains our entire system of justice. And those of us who believe that Trump is a mortal threat to American democracy—the Sanity Caucus—are left with a rickety Joe Biden trying to stop a bulldozer from running over him. We are left hoping that the drip-drip-drip of scandals might take Trump down. That’s not impossible. Biden may well succeed. But he might not, either. Democrats know how to fight within the legal system, but not in the real world. And right now you have to say: advantage Trump.
More on Indulgence Activism
As luck would have it, I came across the ultimate statement of Indulgence Activism a few days after I wrote about it. I was reading Sarah Bakewell’s At The Existentialist Cafe, and found this quote from Camus:
The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.
And just like the rest of the left, there is no mention in this opinion of how Hillary Clinton kept hundreds of emails filled with classified information in an email server in her basement bathroom in New York. The author doesn't bother to mention that the reason the server was there in the first place was to avoid records collection that could be subpoenaed by Congress. It doesn't mention Hillary Clinton's attempts to destroy evidence in violation of a duly authorized subpoena.
But yeah, go ahead and talk about Trump and his retention of classified records. The reason that no one cares what the Department of Justice or anyone left to center has to say on the matter is because their blatant hypocrisy smells so bad that nobody can be in the same room with it.
As in 2016 the media give all the free press to Trump ..... making his Republican primary opponents pay for media space while Trump get it free. They cover stories like the non- Trump/Russia Collusion that makes no sense, while not covering Hillary ties with Russia .... causing their credibility to fall to near zero!