FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

[Rick Plant]

These days Donald Trump routinely melts down on his failed social network Truth Social, but any media worth their salt will only occasionally cover it, because most of it either doesn’t deserve public exposure or is too incoherent to even try to parse. But after the DOJ got the best of Trump in court yesterday, Trump woke up this morning and had his most unhinged meltdown to date. Notably, his meltdown appears to have just cost him dearly.

Various folks have counted it up and determined that Donald Trump has posted on his social network more than sixty times thus far today. More to the point, his posts have been even more inappropriately deranged than usual. He’s been posting full QAnon stuff. He called for martial law. He shared a supposed tweet from his own daughter that wasn’t even real. And that’s just the half of it.

After Trump went on his morning bender, Google announced right around lunchtime that it was banning the Truth Social Android app from its Google Play app store. Google says that this is because the app “standards for content moderation.” But given Google’s lack of action on the moderation front up to this point, and its sudden move after Trump’s dangerous meltdown this morning, it’s pretty clear why Google pulled the trigger today.

So now Trump has cost himself the ability to reach the second biggest mobile platform through an app – and there’s now a good chance Apple will do the same with its App Store. That would cut Trump off from reaching virtually anyone through an app. Users can still theoretically view his social network through a mobile browser. But his social network was getting minimal reach to begin with, and now he’s just cost himself one of his key distribution channels. He’s self destructing in real time, and this is before the DOJ indicts him!

[Rick Plant]

DOJ releases photos of highly classified documents it seized from Trump’s home, which were mixed in with framed Time Magazine covers. DOJ just proved Trump guilty of narcissism and espionage at the same time. Lock him up!

[Rick Plant]

Remember, this filing is officially for the DOJ to prove to the judge that Trump’s special master request is invalid.

But the DOJ received permission to make a forty page filing, and is using it to unofficially show the public just how guilty Trump is.

[Rick Plant]

DOJ says it seized some of the classified documents from inside Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago desk.

[Rick Plant]

The DOJ waited until nearly midnight eastern time before filing its forty page response in the Donald Trump classified documents case. Officially, this filing was to convince a judge that Trump’s belated request for a special master is pointless. Unofficially, the filing was the DOJ’s opportunity to show the public just how guilty Trump is, without having to so much as hold a press conference.

Now that the filing has been released, let’s just say that it should be enough to put Trump away for a long, long time. The DOJ included photos of highly classified documents, clearly identified by their cover sheets, that were found in boxes amongst (possibly fake) framed Time Magazine covers of Trump. So in that sense the DOJ just proved Trump guilty of narcissism and espionage at the same time. But it gets far worse.

The filing also reveals that the DOJ found classified documents inside Donald Trump’s personal desk at Mar-a-Lago. This is the part that erases any reasonable doubt argument he might have tried to make when this gets to trial. Even if he tried to claim that someone on his staff stole those boxes of classified documents and took them to Mar-a-Lago without Trump’s knowledge, this would never explain why some of the documents were inside Trump’s desk. This is, in effect, game over.

But it gets worse for Trump. The filing also reveals that Trump received a grand jury subpoena for all of the classified documents several months ago. This means that when Trump only turned over some of the documents and falsely claimed that they were all of the documents he didn’t merely defy a DOJ request; he defied a grand jury subpoena. That’s textbook felony obstruction of justice.

Now we’re officially on Trump indictment watch. It’s coming. It’s anyone’s guess as to when. It could be next week or next year. But the DOJ doesn’t get this deep into an espionage and obstruction probe without bringing charges. Donald Trump knows it too, which is why he spent all of Tuesday having the meltdown of a lifetime. Now he’s staring at life in prison.

[Rick Plant]

After the DOJ had the FBI carry out a search and seizure warrant for the classified documents that Donald Trump stole and hid in his home, Trump complained that they’d also seized his passports. What did this mean? Were they trying to keep him from fleeing the country? Were they merely in with the boxes of seized documents? Now it turns out it’s a different, and rather damning, answer.

This new DOJ filing reveals that the Feds found clearly labeled classified documents in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago desk, making it much harder for him to argue that he somehow wasn’t involved in the theft and transport of these documents. The DOJ also found Trump’s passports in that desk, and took them as proof that this was indeed Trump’s desk. This passage flagged by the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell is key: “The location of the passports is relevant evidence.”

NEW: DOJ says FBI found one current and one expired official passport, and one expired personal passport, with classified documents in a desk drawer — seemingly tying Trump himself to the unauthorized retention of govt docs: “The location of the passports is relevant evidence”

https://twitter.com/hugolowell/status/1564965683196268549

In other words, if you’re Donald Trump, and you have classified documents in the same desk drawer that you keep your passports in, then you’re clearly treating those classified documents as your own personal property. This will help erase any reasonable doubt arguments that Trump will try to make at trial.

This is all before getting to the question of whether Trump might have been planning to flee the country, and whether he might have intended to take those specific passport-adjacent classified documents with him. Anyone who’s this deep into the process of being criminally indicted for espionage is surely being watched by the DOJ to make sure he doesn’t try to flee. But would Trump know that?

[Rick Plant]

When the DOJ asked the judge for special permission to file a whopping forty page response to Donald Trump’s request for a special master, it was pretty clear that the DOJ was looking to publicly spell out just how guilty Trump is.

Now that the filing has surfaced, it’s even more clear where this is headed. Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman summed it up this way on Twitter: “You don’t make a filing this strong, bold, and factually accusatory if you don’t have every intention to indict.”

He’s correct, of course. The DOJ didn’t need to put forty pages out there publicly, just to get a judge to realize it’s too late for a special master to do anything; that could have been accomplished in five paragraphs. This filing was the DOJ’s big chance to educate the public on just how guilty Trump is, and the DOJ eagerly jumped all over that chance.

This filing clearly takes things past the point of no return, and if the DOJ weren’t already 100% certain that it’s going to criminally charge Trump over this, it wouldn’t have made this filing. The only question is when it’ll happen – and even that answer is far less important than the reality that the DOJ has indeed already decided to charge him.

[Rick Plant]

The best advice any lawyer could give to Donald Trump right now would be to shut up before he incriminates himself further. Of course Trump appears to be surrounded by lawyers so bad that some of them are now also implicated by the Department of Justice. So naturally, Trump is doing the dumbest thing he can do right now, which is to run his mouth.

To that end, Trump is trying to push the laughable argument that the DOJ and FBI tried to make him look bad when they posted a photograph of clearly-labeled top secret documents that they’d found in a carton alongside some of his personal effects. Trump’s argument is that the Feds strewed the items around to make Trump look disorganized, or something. The trouble? Well, see if you can spot it:

Renato Mariotti @renato_mariotti

Trump's admission that the classified material was "in cartons" at his residence is evidence of his guilt.

It would be like a defendant taking issue with a FBI photo showing bricks of cocaine on the floor of his residence instead of "in cartons." It admits possession.



https://twitter.com/renato_mariotti/status/1565101591891480576

That’s right, in his attempt at seizing control of the narrative, it looks like Donald Trump just screwed up and confessed. By stating that he had the classified documents in cartons, he’s admitting that he knew he had classified documents in his possession. This may seem trivial in the world of social media, but it’s the kind of thing that will help get him convicted at trial.