It certainly looks a whole lot like Donald Trump just openly and publicly confessed to stealing highly-classified, top-secret government from the White House, upon his brutal and tumultuous 2020 presidential loss, and unlawfully relocating them to his Mar-a-Lago golf club turned post-White House personal residence.
Ever since the moment Trump was kicked out of office and was no longer protected and shielded by the powers of the United States presidency, countless entities came for him with the full force of the law behind them. The lawsuits, probes, and investigations are impossible to even keep up with at this point, and they continue to mount with the quickness.
But what was already a bad post-White House personal and political life has recently crescendoed into a catastrophic fever pitch for the former president in recent weeks, as everything around him seems to reach its breaking point.
Now, Trump is coming unglued these days, in the worst sort of public, manic, unhinged kind of way.
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In just one leg of a long-running, deranged Truth Social rant, the corrupt, scandal-ridden former president took to his struggling social media platform where he openly and publicly admitted to the Mar-a-Lago document scandal — in which Trump stands credibly accused of and under investigation for stealing hundreds of boxes, full of thousands of highly-classified documents and materials, from the White House upon the end of his term, relocating them to his Palm Beach compound, and proceeding to lie to the National Archives and Records Administration on multiple occasions about his possession of said materials, leaving the DOJ with no choice but to issue an FBI search and seizure warrant that was executed against his estate earlier this year.
As the Justice Department investigation developed, the former president and his legal team were quick to demand a so-called Special Master to be appointed to the case to personally pour through the stolen documents and at least temporarily halt the DOJ’s investigation, in what was undoubtedly an attempt to sway the probe into the corrupt former president’s favor.
Ultimately, that scheme did not go in Donald Trump’s favor, as the Special Master now oversees what will likely turn out to be a criminal prosecution of the former president for violations of multiple laws and regulations, including the Espionage Act.
Trump is not processing that fact very well, at all, and as such, he’s getting sloppy… And seemingly inadvertently confessing to his own crimes.
“….When will you invade Bill and Hillary’s home in search of the 33,000 emails she deleted AFTER receiving a subpoena from the U.S. Congress? When will you invade the other Presidents’ homes in search of documents, which are voluminous, which they took with them, but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The entire rant is on brand for Trump, especially as he wades neck-deep into this unhinged breakdown of his. But it was the last sentence of that Truth Social post that dug Trump’s hole deeper than it’s ever been: “…but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?”
Donald Trump was not transparent about stealing classified government documents. In fact, he quite literally lied to the National Archives more times than we can count about just that. He only became “transparent” once he was quite literally busted red-handed following the FBI raid at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2016 to 2017, Mary McCord, addressed this apparent confession in no uncertain terms, saying, “So, you know, I think that if there hadn’t been many months of back and forth a National Archives saying, we think you have presidential records, him delaying, finally delaying delivering a couple of boxes, still not being a full return of all the boxes, a subpoena being issued, more documents being produced, certification or a declaration that there was all the documents that were in his custody, signed certification and filing a search warrant. If we hadn’t had all of that, he might’ve said in the chaos of moving. I didn’t realize they were all there.”
“So, even if there was a Pollyannaish defense, he has destroyed it with his own changing stories,” she went on to further explain. “I think he is going to say his defense to what he said today in that Truth Social post is ‘Oh, no — again I do everything transparently and openly, of course, it wouldn’t be anything I had any knowledge of what was unlawful. Otherwise, why would you not be trusted?’ But at some point, that just doesn’t hold up anymore.”
Andrew Weissmann, former FBI general counsel and prosecutor under special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, who was personally attacked in Trump’s unhinged rant this week, also weighed in on the matter.
“With Donald Trump, one of the things that you have learned through history and you know as a prosecutor is all of this is never about the actual facts. It is always about invective and adjectives and media spin,” the former Mueller prosecutor said. “If you are his defense lawyer, you are having palpitations because of some of that media spin that he engages in. So, the statement you read at the outset of the program completely belies the defense of the documents were planted.”
“He seems to be saying, ‘Oh, I, openly and notoriously took these documents, but I believed they were my personal documents,'” Weissmann added. “That the mere act of taking them from the White House sort of magically transmogrified them to be my personal documents. That is belied by the fact that, of course, he didn’t have the power and he has said inconsistent things with that latest defense as has his lawyer, where they agreed that these were documents that belonged to the Archives. So, again, I think again I think it’s really important to remember that this is not at all about the actual facts. It is really Donald Trump engaging and media relations, and it’s going to hurt him at trial.”
I believe Donald Trump has officially dug his own hole past the point of return.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
