There is only one real question. Why?
This is not a spy case. He didn’t keep the documents to show them to the Russians. This is not about foreign spies. Donald Trump was not about to show plans for nuclear wars to America’s enemies. He was not keeping top-secret documents for those reasons. He kept them because he could. It is as simple, and utterly inexplicable, as that.
Hubris.
His boxes.
His things.
His mementos.
He was president. He didn’t want people looking through his boxes. He liked showing off his things.
It is all so completely simple and so horrifyingly complicated. All he had to do was return everything when asked and he would have had no problems at all. When they came calling for boxes, as they do, all he had to do was hand over everything and they would have charged him with nothing.
That’s what Hillary Clinton did and Joe Biden did and Mike Pence did and everyone else did; they hand over everything they have, and they cooperate, and they don’t get charged. Who hires a lawyer and then lies to the lawyer (who is busily taking notes on everything to protect himself from his client) and now is hiring another lawyer to protect him from that lawyer when all he had to do was hand over the boxes in the first instance?
Why wouldn’t anyone do that? Just give them all the boxes.
Not Trump. They were his. And what is his, we can see, he does not give up easily. They belong to him. People and things.
A one-way street, they say. It is stunning to see people once loyal to Trump turn on him with abandon, damning that one-way street he treats with such contempt.
Is that good enough for his loyalists?
Will they turn themselves into pretzels, ridiculous-sounding mouthpieces claiming that bathrooms are excellent storage facilities for top-secret documents, standing firm for the high-minded principle that Donald Trump should be above the law just because he is?
That is, after all, the principle here. The law says top-secret documents should be properly secured according to detailed procedures, not stored in bathrooms or spilled on the floor of a storage room. Trump plainly violated the law.
What is his defense? His only defense is basically jury nullification, the idea that he will find at least one juror who — for reasons external to the process, like politics — will choose not to apply the law to the facts and convict him. Voir dire, the process of screening jurors, is supposed to eliminate jurors who can’t leave their other biases behind, but it doesn’t always work, and the jury consultants will be working overtime in this one, looking for jurors who will put the Don above the law. Sort of like OJ.
Selective prosecution? No court will buy that. Everybody else cooperated. Everybody else turned over everything they had. Nobody else lied and swore they’d given up everything and lied to their own lawyers and caused them to lie to the feds. This isn’t hard. He deliberately hid documents, lied and said he produced everything — and then they came back and found more. None of the others did that.
Is this so difficult? The right thing to do is to treat top-secret documents in an appropriate fashion, which is to say, to follow the law — not to store them in publicly accessible bathrooms in a golf club or in a storage room adjoining a ballroom. They shouldn’t be spilling out on the floor. They shouldn’t be shown to people without security clearances. The law is very clear and direct. These are not hard questions. That Donald Trump claims the right to do all these things is nothing less than claiming the right to be above the law. That, ultimately, is his only defense.
