US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3753

On August 13 2022 19:30 Acrofales wrote:
Why is Trump tweeting at the DoJ to release the search warrant, rather than just ... releasing the search warrant? The FBI was legally obligated to give him a copy, meaning he could scan it and put it online whenever he wanted to, rather than tweeting at the DoJ...

On August 13 2022 19:35 Oukka wrote:
Given how much time he spent at Mar-A-Lago while president it's not very hard to imagine how a lot of official documentation found its way there. Likewise the scenes of his presidency ending weren't exactly graceful, wasn't he pretty much carried out of the White House as well? Obviously somebody somewhere fucked up (badly) when all the papers weren't accounted for and retrieved when Biden became president.

Also raises some further questions about US presidents working 'from home'. Surely that practice should eventually be ended, for any number of reasons beginning from costs and security.

On August 13 2022 20:11 r00ty wrote:


Exactly. No phones allowed. Copying or even describing the content outside that area is punishable. TS/SCI clearance also means we're never supposed know what's in it and maybe never will. And it has been lying around at Mar-a-Lago, for how long? A lot of people have not done their job or are traitors to your country.

But the Q crowd is fed, lots of new conspiracies to be spun.

At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said.

The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.

The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the search warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday, an extraordinary step that generated political shock waves.

It also helps to further explain the sequence of events that prompted the Justice Department’s decision to conduct the search after months in which it had tried to resolve the matter through discussions with Mr. Trump and his team.

An inventory of the material taken from Mr. Trump’s home that was released on Friday showed that F.B.I. agents had seized 11 sets of documents during the search with some type of confidential or secret marking on them, including some marked as “classified/TS/SCI” — shorthand for “top secret/sensitive compartmented information.” Information categorized in that fashion is meant to be viewed only in a secure government facility.

Last year, officials with the National Archives discovered that Mr. Trump had taken a slew of documents and other government material with him when he left the White House at the end of his tumultuous term in January 2021. That material was supposed to have been sent to the archives under the terms of the Presidential Records Act.

Mr. Trump returned 15 boxes of material in January of this year. When archivists examined the material, they found many pages of documents with classified markings and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which began an investigation and convened a grand jury.

In the spring, the Justice Department issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump seeking further documents believed to be in his possession. He was repeatedly urged by advisers to return what remained, despite what they described as his desire to continue to hold onto some documents.

In an effort to resolve the dispute, Mr. Bratt and other officials visited Mar-a-Lago in early June, briefly meeting Mr. Trump. Two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, spoke with Mr. Bratt and a handful of investigators he traveled with, people briefed on the meeting said.

Mr. Corcoran and Ms. Bobb showed Mr. Bratt and his team boxes holding material Mr. Trump had taken from the White House that were being kept in a storage area, the people said.

According to two people briefed on the visit, Mr. Bratt and his team left with additional material marked classified, and around that time also obtained the written declaration from a Trump lawyer attesting that all the material marked classified in the boxes had been turned over.

A short time after the meeting, according to people briefed on it, Mr. Bratt sent Mr. Corcoran an email telling him to get a more secure padlock for the room. Mr. Trump’s team complied.

The Justice Department also subpoenaed surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago, including views from outside the storage room. According to a person briefed on the matter, the footage prompted concern among investigators about the handling of the material. It is not clear what time period that footage was from.

Over recent months, investigators were in contact with roughly a half-dozen of Mr. Trump’s current aides who had knowledge of how the documents were handled, two people briefed on the approaches said. At least one witness provided the investigators with information that led them to want to further press Mr. Trump for material, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/us/politics/trump-classified-material-fbi.html