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Trump Indicted; Biden Not Indicted … Yet
The federal government has indicted Donald Trump on the classified documents found at his home in Mar-a-Lago. Trump is facing at least seven federal counts related to document handling and obstruction of justice. He has been ordered to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday.
The former president announced the news on Truth Social:
The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is “secured” by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.
I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!
This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!
Attorney General Merrick Garland launched an investigation in November 2022 to investigate Trump’s alleged improper retention of classified records.
Earlier Thursday, the FBI finally allowed members of the House Oversight Committee to view the FD-1023 document, which involves alleged legal violations by President Joe Biden.
According to Fox News Digital, an informant told the FBI in June 2020 that Biden was paid $5 million by an executive of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where his son Hunter Biden sat on the board.
Add to that Biden’s numerous classified documents scattered across the country, who knows how long the DoJ can remain silent.
Published in Elections, Politics
Mollie has a good position on their special edition episode, starting around the six minute mark. She’s open to maybe someone could convince her that maybe Trump did something wrong but only after the DOJ starts with the oldest living president and works their way to the current one. Once everyone is treated equally, then we can move forward with Trump.
What@heavywater misses is that the President can disclose whatever he wants to whomever he wants. He is the ultimate authority for the determination of who is allowed to receive classified information.
It goes along with his Original Classification authority.
Otherwise we could not tell our allied (say the Brits) that bad guy x is planning to do terror attack y.
The problem in this case is that Trump admits, in a recorded conversation with Mark Meadows’ biographer, that, as President of the United States, Trump did not declassify the documents he was showing to Mark Meadows’ biographer, even as Trump tells this guy that the documents are classified.
Trump, in that recorded conversation, did himself some damage that his attorneys are going to have to try to undo in the courtroom, somehow.
I wish he could speak without yelling, but what he says is so very true. The insurrection was committed by Democrats on June 8th, if not earlier.
You need to check the recording again. The counsel is accused of falsifying the transcript, so don’t rely on that, listen to the recording.
Additionally, I do understand that there is no magic process to declassify something. If you have the classification authority, you can just do it.
But Trump admitted in a recording that he did not declassify those documents when he was President.
Once Trump became an ex-President and held onto those classified documents and then showed them to Mark Meadows’ biographer while telling that guy, “This is secret. I didn’t declassify these,” Trump has put himself in a legal pickle.
We shall see if Trump’s attorneys can get Trump out of this pickle.
The whole case is BS. Watch Mark Levin.
He is a Republican. It doesn’t matter what he did. It doesn’t matter how good his attorneys are.
How many of the felony charges do you think will hold up in court?
Will Trump do prison time?
Unless Mark Levin, who is an attorney, is going to be Trump’s defense attorney, it doesn’t matter what Mark Levin says.
Levin can do his monologue all day long. But that’s not going to have any impact on the evidence presented to the jurors in the courtroom.
We need to realize that when you get into a courtroom, cable TV personalities like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity don’t have any impact. The people who do have an impact are smart, experienced attorneys. Mark Levin falls into both categories. But unless Levin is going to be part of Trump’s legal defense team, it doesn’t matter.
It’s just verbiage and entertainment for people on cable TV. It’s good for ratings but it won’t help Trump.
Months ago in a completely different thread someone posted links to the three federal codes Trump was then accused of violating. I read the text of two of them, and the word used was not “classified“. It was “sensitive“. The problem for Trump or anyone else would be that it would not matter whether something was declassified because it would still remain sensitive data. The example I gave in the thread was a document identifying covert assets in foreign nations. While Trump may have the authority to declassify such a document, the contents, if revealed, would be greatly damaging to US security. As far as I know, he didn’t do that but it was rumored that the documents he took with him contained such information.
I watched the video and agreed with almost all of it. Still it struck me as a lot of smoke as to the legal peril facing Trump. Agree the alleged crimes are process crimes. Agree what Mrs. Clinton did is an order of magnitude worse. But as has been stated here, on the Ricochet podcast and elsewhere just because others are getting away with similar crimes is not a defense in court.
Of course all we have is an outline of the prosecutor’s case. (Same with Biden’s corruption) We don’t know what evidence will be admissible at trial. I certainly hope his attorneys compelled testimony is thrown out. We don’t know what allegations will crumble when the defense presents it case. Still there is a proper way to fight a subpoena. Intentionally lying that you are complying with it is just wrong. On that one, even given a fair judge and jury I don’t think things look good.
Hillary operated an unsecured email server that held and transmitted classified information – that crime was orders of magnitude worse than anything in this Trump indictment. She got off scot-free, ostensibly because she was a candidate for the Presidency. As is Trump, right now.
Levying the charge of “Whataboutism” only pertained when we believed the rule-of-law pertained. Our problems go much deeper, and “holding Trump accountable” does nothing to address them. In fact, by confirming that those who oppose the deep state are held to a different standard, it exacerbates them.
Maybe there is a way back short of civil war or some (I think pie-in-the-sky) idea of “national divorce.” I don’t know what that is. This article pretty much expresses my state of mind, right now.
As Levin points out, the whole underlying crime is Revenge of the Librarians. Prosecutors are going to have a hard time getting around that.
As to some serious offense because Trump may have provided classified information to a person without a security clearance, remember Joe. When the first evidence that Joe had classified documents at Penn, the FBI didn’t come rushing in. They allowed Joe’s attorneys to go through all the boxes and report to the DOJ. Those attorneys didn’t have security clearances. So the DOJ actually permitted civilians to read unredacted classified information just within the last year. Same when additional boxes were found in the beach house, etc.
And there was a similar arrangement for Hillary and emails on her personal server. Her attorneys sorted out the classified correspondence from the unclassified. And they knew that her staff regularly deleted the “classified” mark on documents before sending them to her. But as Comey said, no prosecutor would bring charges – because it’s a librarian charge.
Laws that are selectively enforced are not laws.
If Trump had simply given the documents back when they originally requested them back, it would be a harder case for the government to make.
But if Trump actually did tell people, “Why don’t we just tell them we don’t have anything,” and then asked people to move the documents in order to hide them from the government, that’s a problem in a legal sense.
Right. Like having an expired library card.
Still doesn’t hold a candle to “Yes I have classified documents that I was never allowed to possess outside a Scif, but DOJ isn’t allowed to see them till my lawyers are done reviewing.”
Or bleachbit-ing a private server containing classified materials or smashing subpoenaed phones with a hammer. Now that’s obstruction.
This is like trying to hitch a conspiracy charge to a jaywalking ticket. Or hanging obstruction charges to a bookkeeping entry. No harm was done, this amounts to nothing more than partisan hacks weaponizing the law for partisan hack purposes. That’s the complete explanation for its never being used to prosecute a Democrat.
I wonder if this is the sort of defense that Trump’s attorneys are going to make in the court room.
Is that going to persuade the jurors?
Part of the defense will be that this is a political prosecution. The fact that it’s true will tend to make it more effective.
I guess much will depend on whether the “data” that Trump showed to various people was truly sensitive data that the “average Joe” doesn’t think should be shared with people who don’t have a “need to know.”
If the “data” was not truly “sensitive” material, then perhaps the juror won’t care that Trump decided to share it with Mark Meadows’ biographer.
It reminds me of when Bill Clinton was accused of perjury in a federal court. The defenders of Bill Clinton said, “It’s just lies about sex,” and “Everyone lies.”
It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
Heavy Water, I agree with you that the “what was shared?” should be a hugely important question. But it wasn’t important for Joe or Hillary. In fact, despite Comey dismissing the prosecution, we never got any information on what Hillary was deleted. A little context there might have helped us agree or disagree with his assessment.
Do we know what Joe had at his beach house or in his garage? As I understand it, none of the boxes Joe had were even remotely secured. And he was never allowed to have them at all (stealing classified documents?) till he became President. Yeah, wonder if any of those hundreds of unsecured boxes of documents contained sensitive matters of grave national security.
But Garland never asked, so I guess its ok.
I was in favor of that ruling and wrote a letter to the Detroit News to that effect (which they published). I don’t think the state security apparatus was involved, though.
I don’t think we should push the reset button. We do need to fix the laws on the books, though.
Think about it. If Adam Schiff, Brennan, Panetta et al, who have legitimate security clearances, lie in public every time they discuss evidence that they’ve seen regarding a member of either party, our rivals around the world know that the opposite is true. Their simple minded hackery is actually revealing national secrets.
Isn’t she about 70 years too old for him?
Looks like Jazz Shaw beat me to the points in my posts above. No surprise Jazz puts it together much better than I did.
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/06/10/the-bizarre-claims-emerging-in-the-trump-documents-case-n556995
I do not think that the actual recording has been made public unless it was attached to the indictment and I didn’t see it. The indictment supposedly quotes the recording. That is not the same thing.
So much BS has been shoveled about on this subject that I don’t know what to think. We’ve had NTs claim that Trump didn’t follow the procedures to declassify documents. How many of those fools can describe the procedures and then document that the chief executive is bound by those procedures? I’d bet none. As WFB, Jr. once said, “Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.”
Trump himself made the incredibly stupid statement that he could “declassify by just thinking about it”, or more accurately, the media reported that. After sitting out the 2016 election because in CA the results were not in doubt, and also because I didn’t trust The Orange One, I gave enough money to his campaign in 2020 that I could have made AOC’s hit list. Still, the idea that he thinks he could walk out of the Oval Office carrying sensitive documents and excuse that by saying, “I declassified them in my mind” is over the line for me.
Yes. The full text of the law also said something to the effect of “someone not authorized to receive it”.
Which begs the question, who can authorize someone to receive the information?
The answer to that is the Original Classification Authority.
The top person who determines who is allowed to see or hear sensitive national information is the President. Every other person in the government gets their authority from him.
The odd thing about the statute is that it talks about sensitive national information. All that means is information that has not yet been classified by a Classification Authority.
Here is an example. Pretend that a guy from country x walks into our embassy and has information to sell. When he talks to our people and they begin vetting him, his information is sensitive, but not yet classified. Once he has been vetted and enrolled as a source, his information and the information about him is classified to some degree and given the caveat “humint”.
Caveats reference a form of sensitive national information and handling restrictions, but are not classified in and of themselves.
The person who has Original Classification Authority determines both of these things for information created under their watch.
For Example, Hillary, while Secretary of State was The Original Classification Authority for all Department of State information. She could do what she liked with stuff the DOS created. She did not have this authority for information created by DOD, particularly if the DOD attached the ORCON caveat to their information. The ORCON caveat means that the Original Classification Authority Controls who the information may be given to and when the information will be declassified.
There does seem to be a good argument that the president can declassify something simply by showing it to someone who normally wouldn’t have access. That is, by that action, without requiring a slew of forms, “signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.”
Considering the president is the chief executive, do you really think they need to send forms to themselves for their approval?