If there’s one thing worse than a crooked tyrant, it’s an unpatriotic crooked tyrant, and with the unsealing of the detailed 44-page indictment handed down against him by a federal grand jury in Miami last week, one thing is clear: Donald Trump checks all the boxes. Trump, who began his adult life dodging the draft in order to avoid serving his country in Vietnam, has passed the rest of it dodging criminal indictments for tax fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud and fraud-fraud. He has finally hit a wall in the federal indictment-dodging department. The grand jury charged him with willfully retaining classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act, withholding classified documents, corruptly concealing classified documents and conspiring to obstruct justice, the latter of which Trump commits as casually as he consumes cheeseburgers.
It wouldn’t be an indictment of Donald Trump if it did not contain at least one count of making false statements. One surmises that this is the only count that truly shocked Trump, who was assessed by the Washington Post to have made over 35,000 false statements during his presidency alone, and that only counts public ones.
Trump apparently doesn’t have any attorneys, at least in The Case of The Stolen National Security Secrets, because more or less contemporaneously with the unsealing of the indictment, the two principal lawyers representing him quit. True to form, Trump insisted that he had fired them. But apart from the fact that nothing Trump says is truthful, no rational attorney appreciates being associated with a debacle.
Both the evidence and the law disfavor Trump – lopsidedly. Of the hundreds of classified documents that Trump deliberately took with him to Mar-a-Lago and deliberately withheld knowing that he could not lawfully do so, the Justice Department chose to confine itself to charging Trump on 31, marked either “secret” or “top secret.” These included documents regarding White House intelligence briefings, documents concerning our military capabilities and those of foreign countries, documents concerning our military planning, documents concerning our vulnerability to military attack – and documents concerning our nuclear weapons. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents,” the grand jury charged, “could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”
Trump had these sensitive documents strewn all over Mar-a-Lago – in his office, in his bathroom and in a ballroom, and actively schemed to keep representatives of the United States government from finding them. He suggested to certain of his lawyers that they lie to the FBI and the grand jury about his retention of the documents, and suggested to another that he hide or destroy documents. In familiar mob boss fashion — familiar to mob bosses and familiar to Trump – he caused another of his attorneys to falsely certify that all classified documents had been turned over, knowing, of course, that that was a lie. We will never know the scope of the harm that Trump has caused the women and men of our armed forces, or to the country as a whole. All we really now, from experience, is that Donald Trump couldn’t care less.
MAGA World responded with the usual risible nonsense, chalking the indictment up to retaliation by “the Biden Crime Family,” and so forth. William Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General, was somewhat more tethered. “These documents are among the most sensitive secrets the country has,” Barr told Fox News. “If even half of (the indictment) is true then he’s toast.” Donald Trump may indeed be headed to prison at long last. But it is the country he falsely claims to give a damn about that’s gotten burnt.
Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
