How a case that was originally about the mishandling of classified information became about misleading a federal grand jury.
How a case that was originally about the mishandling of classified information became about misleading a federal grand jury.
H ow could Trump do it?
How could someone who sat in the Oval Office, responsible for national security, be so recklessly irresponsible with the nation’s defense secrets?
This was the sort of hair-on-fire stuff we heard from the media–Democratic complex for five months, beginning with last summer’s shocking FBI search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Did Trump sell classified information to China? Or did he just hand it off to his old pal Vlad Putin . . . or maybe even Nick Fuentes! It continued, day after day, court proceeding after court proceeding, Washington Post after New York Times after CNN. Right up until the calendar turned to 2023.
That’s when we suddenly learned . . . drumroll . . . that Joe Biden had been illegally hoarding classified information for decades, from his time in the Senate through his time as Obama administration vice president. He’d stored such information at location after location, from his private office to his private den to his private garage.
Only then did we hear that, well, whaddya know, it turns out to be very, very difficult to keep track of all these top-secret papers in a busy pol’s chaotic exit from high public office to the complex “private” world of leveraging political influence for Chinese cash. It’s not easy being “the big guy.”
Biden’s little problem prompted a major overhaul at the Justice Department, which had been cruising toward a Trump Espionage Act indictment (the lead crime — mishandling national-defense information — in its Mar-a-Lago search warrant).
Suddenly, there was no more chatter about how condemnable Trump was for keeping over 300 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, some of them at the highest levels of secrecy that could do grave damage to national security if mishandled — just like Biden’s haul. Suddenly, the Trump documents-retention case was no longer a documents-retention case.
Presto: The Trump documents case became the Trump grand-jury-obstruction case. We started pointing this out to you in February (see here and here), and have offered periodic reminders ever since (see, e.g., here, here, and here).
There are now signs that an indictment could be imminent. The Wall Street Journal reports that Special Counsel Jack Smith has completed the investigative phase of his Mar-a-Lago inquiry, and is at the point of deciding whether (more like when) to indict Trump. The former president’s lawyers have dashed off a letter to Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, demanding a meeting, which suggests they believe Smith is poised to file charges.
Smith may already have proposed a charging decision to Garland. That is worth pausing over. There was no reason for Garland to appoint a special counsel for Trump because there is no conflict of interest in the Biden Justice Department’s investigating Trump. The conflict lies in the Biden Justice Department’s investigating Hunter Biden and the Biden family for suspected crimes. But Garland steadfastly refuses to appoint a scrupulous, nonpartisan prosecutor for those escapades because doing so could torpedo the unpopular president as he gears up for his reelection bid.
Garland thus appointed Smith out of political calculation, not to ward off a conflict of interest. He knew Trump, in seeking the presidency, would claim that Biden was weaponizing the Justice Department against the opposition. So to manufacture the illusion that Biden and his Justice Department are walled off from the Trump investigations, Garland appointed Smith and proclaimed him independent. But he’s not independent; he reports to Garland and the power he exercises belongs to Biden.
As often happens to those who engage in such subterfuge, Garland was too clever by half: When it turned out that Biden was a serial classified-information pilferer, the appointment of Smith left Garland no choice but to appoint a special counsel, Robert Hur, to probe Biden’s illegal document retention. But unlike Smith, who was given sweeping authority to investigate Trump over Mar-a-Lago and potential January 6 offenses, Hur has a narrow remit, relating only to mishandling classified documents. He is not authorized to open the Pandora’s box of the Biden family business of peddling Joe’s political influence for big bucks from corrupt, anti-American regimes.
Of course, Biden will never be charged with crimes related to classified documents. Justice Department guidance does not permit the indictment of a sitting president, but Garland will ultimately decide that no charges should be brought anyway. On that, he has gotten an assist from Mike Pence, who, right after ripping Biden for retaining classified documents from his time as Obama’s vice president, inconveniently discovered that he, too, had retained classified documents from his time as Trump’s vice president.
At first, it seemed that Biden’s misadventures with classified intelligence might make it politically impossible to charge Trump with any crimes arising out of his document retention at Mar-a-Lago. But the Democrats’ progressive base zealously wants Trump to be charged, and Biden is not in the habit of denying the base. Smith has thus homed in on a narrow path for distinguishing the Biden and Pence situations from Trump’s: While they cooperated with the government’s efforts to locate and return the secret intelligence to its proper files, Trump fought the government all the way. Obstruction.
Consequently, the most important document in the Mar-a-Lago case does not bear classified markings; it bears the raised seal of a federal grand-jury subpoena. The Trump case is no longer about classified documents. It is about how Trump caused false information to be communicated to investigators and the grand jury — specifically, through the sworn claim provided by his lawyers on June 3, 2022, that, after a diligent search, the approximately 38 documents they surrendered to the FBI that day were the only ones bearing classified markings left at Mar-a-Lago. Since Biden’s little problem arose, Smith has spent his time amassing evidence that Trump knew this was untrue and spent the ensuing weeks overseeing the handling and hiding of documents he knew he should have turned over to the FBI pursuant to the subpoena — many of which were found in his personal office when the FBI executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in early August.
That’s what the Mar-a-Lago case is now about: lying about the documents and hiding the documents, not the content of the documents — which would hit too close to home for Biden.
The signs indicate that Smith thinks he has made that case. If so, Trump will say he is being persecuted by his political adversaries. The Biden administration will say that anyone in America would be prosecuted for willfully misleading a grand jury. And as ever, other Republican presidential candidates will have to spend their time talking about Trump rather than their own campaigns — a perfect execution of the Democrats’ 2024 plan.