The problem with writing about Donald Trump and his minions is that absolutely everyone lies all the time. They lie to advance a narrative; they lie to cover their asses; they lie to distract from crimes with salacious gossip; and they lie for the sheer joy of it. And this difficulty is exacerbated because so much of the coverage of Trumpland is either access journalism, with reporters wholly dependent on their sources, or slavering rightwing coverage slanted to hide Trump’s many crimes.
No one is better at sussing out the meta-narrative than Marcy Wheeler, the independent investigative journalist, who has a deep dive into the weekend’s revelations from the New York Times and ABC about Trump’s retention of presidential records almost two years after being voted out of office. As she points out, the Times’s Maggie Haberman and Mike Schmidt make much of a suggestion bruited by Trump that he’d hand over the boxes of purloined documents in exchange for the release of records he somehow believed would prove that the Russia investigation was a hoax from the jump.
Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.
In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.
That would be the gossipy distraction to distract from the underlying crime — particularly since Trump’s lawyers immediately nixed the idea of attempting to use wrongfully retained documents to extort the disclosure of government secrets. In fact, the article notes that more or less everyone in Trump’s orbit knew or suspected that the boxes contained classified materials, and that Trump went through them himself in December of 2021, meaning he was actually aware of the contents.
Is it true? Dunno! Might this be yet another CYA lie from the Trumplanders who are currently wondering if repeating their boss’s false allegations to federal investigators was perhaps a strategic error? Could be!
Meanwhile, reporting by ABC’s Mike Levine and Katherine Faulders suggests that Trump was seeking to bargain for the release of a binder of documents on the origin of the Russia-investigation compiled in the last few days of his administration and supposedly declassified on January 19, 2021. This is the bullshit Trump’s lackey Kash Patel and disgraced Hill reporter John Solomon have been teasing, and it’s the reason Patel and Solomon got appointed as Trump’s representatives to the Archives.
Trump formally issued his “declassification” memo regarding those documents at around 7 p.m. ET on his last full day in office, Jan. 19, 2021, the same day Solomon allegedly met with him.
“I had a brief interview with President Trump in which he told me unequivocally he had signed the order completing the [declassification] and that I would be getting a set of the declassified documents to post online for the public,” Solomon told ABC News in a statement this past week. “Later that same day, I was allowed, on two occasions, to briefly review a stack of documents that I was told were the declassified documents. I wasn’t allowed to keep the documents either time, but was told I would get a full set later in the day.”
Shortly after 9 p.m. ET that day, Solomon appeared on Fox News and said he had “been through all the documents at least one time now.”
You can safely file this one under “lies to advance a narrative.” Multiple investigations have found that the Russia inquiry was appropriately predicated, and anyway, no one gives a shit about the Mueller Report in the fall of 2022. But these fools will never quit trying to fornicate with that chicken, so … here we are.
In the event, the counter-dossier was never made public, at least not in its entirety. Either because Trump was too incompetent to accomplish what he was trying to do, or because the Justice Department swooped in at the last minute to protect sources and methods, and the binder stayed under wraps. Although interestingly, ABC suggests that Mark Meadows kept copies of personal texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were fired from the Mueller investigation after news of their personal relationship became public. Whether that’s because he hoped to weaponize them or because he’s a gross perv was never made clear — maybe he just wanted to use their addresses to register to vote.
And now we come to the “lies for the sheer joy of it” section of our program, starring Donald J. Trump, natch.
“I had a small number of boxes in storage. There is no crime. They should give me immediately back everything they have taken from me because it’s mine,” Trump told the knuckledraggers assembled in Arizona last night, going on to tell lies about George H.W. Bush stealing presidential records and stashing them in a bowling alley, i.e. the facility rented by NARA to sort them.
“These are radical left lunatics, and they lose documents, they plant documents. Let’s see, is there a book on nuclear destruction or the building of a nuclear weapon cheaply, let’s put that box, let’s put that book in with Trump,” he went on. And thanks to US District Judge Cannon nixing the requirement that Trump specify which if any of the seized items was “planted,” he can continue to make these allegations publicly.
And this week federal prosecutors will have their hands full of Trump’s bullshit, so to speak, filing a response to his Hail Mary pass to Justice Clarence Thomas tomorrow, and its opening brief at the Eleventh Circuit on the appeal contesting the special master order in its entirety.
Fun times!
[Empty Wheel / NYT / ABC]
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