Donald Trump spent years screaming bloody murder after he got kicked off of Twitter, but there’s a pretty good argument to be made that his continuing political viability is only possible because we’re no longer experiencing the daily firehose of his unmediated ranting. Every few days a report trickles through, like a dispatch from a foreign country, where they speak the same language but in a vaguely demented dialect. If you squint just right, you can more or less make out the meaning, or at least enough to remind yourself how much better it is where you live, and, golly, things really do seem to be degenerating quickly in Magastan!
Which is how we found out about Trump’s new theory of how it’s totally fine that he had all those classified documents in his pool locker because he was just taking souvenirs.
Page 1: The Fake News Media & Crooked Democrats (That’s been proven!) keep saying I had a “large number of documents” in order to make the Biden Classified Docs look less significant. When I was in the Oval Office, or elsewhere, & “papers” were distributed to groups of people & me, they would often be in a striped paper folder with “Classified” or “Confidential” or another word on them. When the session was over, they would collect the paper(s), but not the folders, & I saved hundreds of them…
Page 2: Remember, these were just ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them, but they were a “cool” keepsake. Perhaps the Gestapo took some of these empty folders when they Raided Mar-a-Lago, & counted them as a document, which they are not. It’s also possible that the Trump Hating Marxist Thugs in charge will “plant” documents while they’re in possession of the material. As President, and based on the Presidential Records Act & Socks Case, I did NOTHING WRONG. JOE DID!
Alrighty then!
Let’s unpack, shall we? Because, as usual, this jackass is full of shit. And we know he’s full of shit since he filed that idiotic lawsuit against the Justice Department and lucked onto Judge Aileen Cannon’s docket, where he managed to kick loose a crapton of details about the DOJ’s search, including an inventory of the items seized.
Oh, hai, Box #2 (of 33), making very clear that the Justice Department differentiated between the “43 Empty Folders with ‘CLASSIFIED’ Banners” and the 24 “US Government Documents with CONFIDENTIAL/SECRET/TOP SECRET Classification Markings.”
And Trump had a chance to argue that some of that stuff was “planted.” He adamantly refused to do so when Special Master Raymond Dearie told him he had to put up or shut up, and eventually Judge Cannon bailed him out.
As for the “Presidential Records Act & Socks Case,” that’s probably a reference to the disastrous advice Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton gave him, citing a 2011 case his organization filed against the National Archives, demanding that it designate tapes Bill Clinton made for his biographer Taylor Branch as presidential records. The records were supposedly stored in Clinton’s sock drawer, making this the “Socks Case” for a particular kind of online red hat weirdo. Judge Amy Berman Jackson dismissed the complaint, holding that the Archives could not unilaterally classify a record as presidential. From which Fitton, who is not a lawyer, inferred that Trump has the power to magically declare any record personal and take it home with him, and there was nothing the Justice Department could do about it because the Presidential Records Act contains no enforcement mechanism.
Which sounds so blazingly stupid that no one could possibly believe it — particularly since the unsealed portions of the affidavit make reference to, among other things, the Espionage Act, and not the PRA. But in fact Trump’s lawyers made this exact argument in court, before the Eleventh Circuit told Judge Cannon that she was an embarrassment to the profession and shut the whole misbegotten exercise down.
WHICH DID NOT DISAPPEAR ALL THE STUFF WE LEARNED WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!
OMG, he’s still talking:
Page 3: Biden is being treated so smuch better than me [sic], I’m shocked (not really!). Why aren’t they raiding his house, & how come his representatives and lawyers are allowed to work together with the Gestopo [sic] in looking for documents, when my lawyers & representatives were not allowed anywhere near the search. We weren’t even allowed to know what they took when they raided my home. “Please leave the premises,” they said, & then lugged out everything they could, including my Passports & Med Recs.
Now, don’t faint, kids, but this is also abject nonsense. Let’s start with the “Passports and Med Recs,” since that’s another gift from the Cannon debacle. The passports weren’t seized because the “Gestopo” was lugging out everything they could. Thanks to Trump’s stupid lawsuit, we know that “the government seized the contents of a desk drawer that contained classified documents and governmental records commingled with other documents” which included two expired passports whose location is “relevant evidence in an investigation of unauthorized retention and mishandling of national defense information.”
As for the medical records, they were similarly next to classified docs, and anyway it was just that dumb letter from Trump’s weirdo doctor saying he was a great golden god who would live forever, or words to that effect. Trump himself published that letter years ago, and then sent his goons to raid the guy’s office.
And as we have pointed out here, the reason the FBI didn’t treat Biden the way it treated Trump is that Biden didn’t spend months telling the Archives and then the DOJ to get fucked. Trump had a chance to do it the right way, and he chose to take Tom Fitton’s advice instead.
You pay your money, you take your chances.
[Trump v. US, Docket via Court Listener]
Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty. And if you’re ordering from Amazon, use this link, because reasons.
