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It doesn’t give me any joy to write this article.
Even a cursory examination of the redacted edition of the affidavit filed in the government’s request for a search warrant at the home of former President Donald Trump shows that he will soon be indicted by a federal grand jury for 3 crimes: defense information, giving NDI to those who are not legally lawful to possess them; and obstruction of justice by failing to return NDI to those who are legally entitled to recover them.
When he learned through a phone call that 30 FBI agents were at the front door of his Florida apartment with a search warrant and that he made the decision to disclose it publicly, Trump assumed the agents were looking for top-secret classified documents. allege that he possessed criminally. His assumptions were based on his intuition and not on a complicated investigation of the law. Hence his public boasting of having declassified all the previously classified documents he carried with him.
Unbeknownst to him, the government had planned such a defense and is not preparing to qualify him with ownership of classified documents, even though he had many voluntarily submitted documents marked as “top secret. “It doesn’t matter if the records have been declassified, as the federal government will qualify crimes that don’t require evidence of classification. They told the federal judge about who signed the search warrant that Trump still had NDI in his home. It turns out they were right.
According to the law, it doesn’t matter if the documents the NDI is on are classified or not, because it is fair and corrupt to have NDI in a non-federal establishment, to make sure that those without security clearance move it from one position to another and hide it from the feds when asked. In other words, the lack of ranking, for whatever reason, is not a defense against the charges that would possibly be brought against Trump.
However, by misinterpreting and underestimating federal authorities, Trump has in fact done them a favor. One of the things they have to prove for each of the 3 crimes is that Trump knew he had the documents. The favor he did by admitting it when he boasted that they were no longer classified. He committed a mortal sin in the global defense of thieves by denying something for which he had not been accused.
The detail at the moment that the federal government will have to reveal is that the documents do involve data on national defense. And the third detail he has to reveal is that Trump put those documents in the hands of those who are not legal to retain them and store them in an unsecured position through the federal government. Experts in the intelligence network have already reviewed documents seized from Trump’s home and are willing to tell a jury that they involve the names of foreign agents who are secretly executed for the United States. . It is the jewel in the crown of government secrets. In addition, Trump’s Florida home is not a secure federal facility designated for the NDI depot.
Alleged obstruction: Justice Department says it’s “likely” Mar-a-Lago documents have been withheld and efforts made to obstruct the investigation
Previous Coverage: DOJ Indicates Certain Privileged Documents Were Known from Review of Documents Seized from Mar-a-Lago
The most recent aspect of the case against Trump that we learned from the redacted affidavit is the obstruction charge. This is not the obstruction robert Mueller claimed to have uncovered committed through Trump’s Russia investigation. This is a more recent obstruction bill, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, which imposes far fewer tariffs on the federal government to test. a grand jury or prevents a witness from testifying commits this variant of obstruction.
But the Bush-era law, the one the administration is contemplating accusing Trump of violating, makes it a crime of obstruction by failing to return government assets or sending the FBI in search of the wild goose to hunt for anything that belongs to the government and that you know you have. This law does not require the pre-existence of legal procedures. It only requires the defendant to have government property, know that he has it, and baselessly resist the government’s efforts to achieve it.
Where does all this leave Trump? The short answer is: in hot water. The longest answer is this: He is once again confronted with the federal intelligence and law enforcement communities for which he has correctly expressed so much public contempt. He had valid problems of expression of the Russian investigation. It has little floor to stand today.
I have argued that many of those laws that the federal government has enacted to protect itself are morally unjust and have no constitutional basis. One of my intellectual heroes, the wonderful Murray Rothbard, taught that government protects itself far more aggressively than it protects our herbal rights. .
In a monumental irony, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalist who exposed U. S. war crimes. The U. S. military in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency worker who exposed the government’s vast corrupt surveillance of the American public, are accused of the same thing. On Assange and Snowden, Trump argued that they deserve to be executed. Fortunately for all three, those laws do not provide for the death penalty.
Rothbard warned that the federal government was aggressively protecting itself. However, Assange and Snowden are heroic defenders of freedom with valid ethical and legal defenses. public, as long as the developer is not the thief. Snowden is through the Constitution, which expressly prohibits warrantless surveillance that he revealed, which was the ultimate abuse of government force in peacetime.
What will Trump say to protect himself from taking data on national defense? I can’t think of a legally viable one.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court justice, has nine books on the U. S. Constitution.
This article gave the impression in the New Jersey Herald: Donald Trump will soon be indicted. Here’s why