The Justice Department's case for obstruction at Mar-a-Lago is growing stronger

[catbyte]

It looks like Trump and others knew what he had, knew where it was, and knew not all of it had been returned.

Sept. 1, 2022, 5:56 AM EDT
By Frank Figliuzzi, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

After the Department of Justice’s 36-page response to former President Donald Trump’s request for a special master to review material the FBI seized from his home, we could be inching close to someone, maybe Trump himself, being charged with obstruction of justice. Tuesday’s well-crafted objections to Trump’s request constitute a simple, yet persuasive, smackdown of the Trump team’s flawed legal logic. There were a number of eyebrow-raising revelations by DOJ, but more important was the department’s subtle but sustained theme of obstruction.

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The DOJ’s assertions seem to make a case for both the “knowing concealment” and the “intent to impede” requirements for obstruction. But if those elements are satisfied, who could be charged and based on what conduct? Well, The Washington Post reports that Trump attorney Christina Bobb told the newspaper that Trump lawyers showed federal officials the boxes in the storage room and that Jay Bratt, chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, spent time looking through them. That sounds like a direct contradiction of the DOJ’s claim that Trump's team denied a request from government officials to enter the storage room and check for documents.

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The DOJ filing also takes issue with the claim that Trump declassified by “standing order” all the seized documents when he was president. DOJ points out that “neither counsel nor the custodian asserted that the former President had declassified the documents or asserted any claim of privilege.” Over a dozen former Trump officials have disputed the notion that there was a “standing order” to declassify whatever Trump wanted. That could mean that former Trump adviser Kash Patel is in trouble. It’s Patel who has claimed he can personally attest to Trump’s “standing order” defense. Time will tell who’s telling the truth, but if the FBI were to develop evidence that Patel and Trump conspired to concoct a phony standing order defense, then they could be charged.

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Increasingly, it looks like Trump and others knew what he had, knew where it was, and knew not all of it had been returned. The questions they should now be asking themselves include, “How much more does DOJ know, and how many of us are going to be charged?”

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[Wounded Bear]

1. K & R...nt

[underpants]

2. Maybe Trump had these documents as part of his stable genius plan

to win the Nobel Peace Prize he so richly thinks he deserves.