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Surprise Surprise - DOJ suspects Trump may still have more documents... [1]
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Date: 2022-10-06
NO NO NO! MINE MINE MINE! YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM! WITCH HUNT WITCH HUNT! CIVL WAR!
The NY Times reports:
Conversations between department officials and the former president’s representatives have underscored investigators’ skepticism about his cooperation and exposed a rift among his lawyers.
Really?
A top Justice Department official told former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the department believed he had not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter. The outreach from the official, Jay I. Bratt, who leads the department’s counterintelligence operations, is the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Mr. Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents the former president was supposed to have turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term. It is not clear what steps the Justice Department might take to retrieve any material it thinks Mr. Trump still holds.
Every day that Trump walks free is evidence that there seems no law that can touch him. It’s not like there isn’t evidence to charge him with a crime. Anyone else who had been found to be in possession of items like these would have been hauled away long ago.
That rug alone is a crime.
The government has found more than 300 classified documents in material that had been kept at Mar-a-Lago, including some marked as containing the most sensitive information that would cross the president’s desk. But the Justice Department has previously signaled doubts that Mr. Trump had turned over everything in his possession. Shortly after the search in August, it was revealed that federal investigators had found dozens of empty folders at Mar-a-Lago marked as containing classified information. The disclosure raised further questions about whether the Justice Department had indeed recovered all the classified materials that may have been taken out of the White House. The empty folders were found during the search of Mar-a-Lago along with 40 other empty folders that said they contained sensitive documents that should be returned “to staff secretary/military aide,” according to a court filing. Agents found the empty folders along with seven documents marked as “top secret” in Mr. Trump’s office. Investigators also found 11 more marked as “top secret” in a storage room.
Lock him up — and impeach Judge Aileen Cannon as well.
..In a September court filing, the Justice Department complained that a judge’s decision to bar the authorities from having access to the documents they seized in the search — later partially reversed by a federal appeals court — would limit their ability to determine whether documents were missing. The injunction, the department said in the filing, “appears to bar the FBI and DOJ from further reviewing the records to discern any patterns in the types of records that were retained, which could lead to identification of other records still missing.” The department added that the injunction “would prohibit the government from using any aspect of the seized records’ contents to support the use of compulsory process to locate any additional records.” Among the potential crimes that the department cited in seeking the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago was obstruction.
emphasis added
We know damn well that if a Democratic former president had done anything like this, they’d be in Leavenworth — or Guantanamo — already. But Trump? He just keeps throwing out more lawsuits and holding rallies while he claims it’s all a witch hunt.
So instead we get this:
The acting U.S. archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, told the congressional committee that the agency would consult with the Justice Department on whether to “initiate an action for the recovery of records unlawfully removed.” “While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should,” Ms. Wall wrote to Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the Oversight Committee.
Sometimes, you just get tired of putting up with this stuff. Enough already.
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