FBI Raids Mar-A-Lago

[broncofan]

I've never practiced criminal law and don't litigate but there's a really broad range of competency among lawyers. We have 170+ law schools in the United States and though the bar exams are reasonably well-written, one can take the exam as many times as they need to pass. Taking this further, no matter how well you prepare someone in legal theory and legal reasoning there are people who just don't have common sense, which the bar exam does try to screen for, but not well enough. Trump does not hire talented lawyers and since he's run for President his saving grace has been the protections Presidents get from prosecution, lawsuits, and disclosure in some cases. He's also defended by vast media organs that do public relations work for him gratis and a mob who threatens the people who would investigate or prosecute him.

From what I've read the FBI is going to be fingerprinting the documents taken from Mar-A-Lago to see who has handled them. I don't know how well fingerprints will show up on paper but the idea is that these documents are supposed to only be seen and handled by certain people.

I do worry that people who think there will necessarily have been a plot to sell secrets will be disappointed. We don't have Trump on tape on 1/6 saying "attack the Capitol, overturn the elections, and kill every Democratic Congress person". But I did hear him tell Georgia's Secretary of State that he wants him to find the number of votes he needs to win and that he may have liability if he doesn't. We have to accept that these kinds of actions are often criminal and should be punished. Putting nuclear secrets in a country club storage locker when you're not President and not returning them when demanded should be enough to convict him of a felony.

[Stavros]

Thanks for this post, Broncofan. I think it not only explains the lawyers who come across as being a little 'unhinged' -Sidney Powell drinking Dr Pepper is an enduring image- but also why Trump in effect make up his own rules, and either ignores the lawyers who tell him in simple language that every document, from a classified report into the USA's nuclear arsenal, to a receipt from McDonalds, is Government Property and he can't pocket it, rip it up, or flush it down the toilet. Or just says 'so what?'.

The man just doesn't care about rules, it is characteristic of his life and the Presidency, and thus even lawyers just give up trying to get him to be obedient to the rules that matter. What does one do with such an anarchic bully? It makes you wonder if any lawyer wants to represent him in Court, unless their only advice is, 'Take the Fifth'! because that's the only advice they can give that won't land their client in prison.

Then there is the question -do these people ever get paid? How many of the 16+ lawyers representing him I have identified are still waiting on Trump to settle their bills?

[broncofan]

How many of the 16+ lawyers representing him I have identified are still waiting on Trump to settle their bills?

That's funny. Maybe it's free advertising to show people how low they're willing to go. Like I will defend you no matter how bad you are.

Trump violates rules that are often laws but people have gotten so used to his way of doing things that they really think prosecutors should need more than criminal acts to convict him. When looking at incomplete information, they need the unknown facts to be the worst permutation possible or it's like he hasn't done anything wrong.

[filghy2]

Then there is the question -do these people ever get paid? How many of the 16+ lawyers representing him I have identified are still waiting on Trump to settle their bills?

Possibly including Rudi Giuliani, according to past reports.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...er-falling-out

[Stavros]

Does this mean Trump's lawyers have broken the law?

"The FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after it obtained evidence there was probably an effort to conceal classified documents in defiance of a grand jury subpoena and despite his lawyers suggesting otherwise, the justice department said in a court filing.
...
As Trump’s lawyer and custodian turned over the folder to Jay Bratt, the justice department’s chief counterintelligence official, the custodian produced and signed a letter certifying a “diligent search” had been conducted and all documents responsive to the subpoena were being returned."
FBI searched Trump Mar-a-Lago home over ‘likely’ efforts to hide classified files, justice department says | Donald Trump | The Guardian

[Stavros]

Something occurs to me with regard to the documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. I have worked on original documents in archives in the UK, Europe, the US and the Middle East, and in most cases the documentation is meticulous. I assume therefore, that for example, any of the US intelligence services providing the President with briefing or background papers, will have given them an identifiable reference, so that the Archivists should be able to look at the list of documents sent to the Oval Office, and check them off against the list that were handed over to them. The President and his staff would then have to explain the absence of a document that was sent to the Oval Office, but not to the Archive. I wonder if this has also been the basis of the DoJ search of Trump's property?

Meanwhile, this article by Andrew Feinberg looks at the security and intelligence implications, on the basis that if Trump retained documents that contain highly sensitive information on human intelligence sources and also SIGINT, these may have or could compromise American security in the US and abroad. Mention is made of Trump's cavalier attitude to sensitive intelligence, referring to a US agent that had to be exfiltrated from Moscow because of Trum's incompetence -if that is what it was, as

"The extraction operation reportedly took place not long after Mr Trump revealed highly classified intelligence which Israeli officials had provided to the US regarding Isis to then-Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov during a 2017 Oval Office meeting."
‘We’re gonna blind ourselves’: Ex-intel officials say Trump’s document hoarding could ruin years of work | The Independent

Russia, Russia, Russia indeed!