by VICTORIA TAFT
Great news: we at PJ Media know you value your time, so as a public service, we’ll save you five or so years of hand-wringing about the Donald Trump has super secret documents in his house! case and just tell you upfront that it’s BS. I mean, we know how fun it is for the media wing of the Democrat Party to gleefully spin The Walls Are Closing in on Donald Trump! stories, but we’ll cut to the chase by telling you why these charges would make a fine addition to my compost pile.
First, the setup. Just as American Democrats were getting heartburn over Joe Biden’s bribery allegations, his 150 pesky Suspicious Activity Reports by the banks, and all his family’s LLCs set up to launder the money, there came news that Donald Trump was up to no good again. That dastardly man! Did he possess Ukrainian bribe money? No, silly. Recall that Trump was impeached over wanting to get to the bottom of the Biden/Ukraine bribery scandal.
No, Trump’s “crime” was possessing documents that some of the same prosecutors who claimed Trump was a Russian secret agent now claim didn’t belong to him. In fact, they were super secret documents that no former president should ever, ever have. Indeed, a collective gasp went up in the media wing of the Democrat Party when the 37 counts! were listed in the 49-page document issued by professional election hitman Jack Smith.
Now, this is not to say that Donald Trump may not end up in Ted Kaczynski’s old cell at the Florence, Colo., Super Max prison, hanging out with Ramzi Yousef. This is a banana republic, after all — just ask that meme guy in New York. But I am making the point that even some certified smart guys and Hillary Clinton believe these charges are absurd. You know, just like all the others.
Kash Patel is a former federal prosecutor, former federal defense attorney, and former DoD official who was instrumental in ferreting out the 2016 Russian Collusion fraud against Donald Trump, along with former Congressman Devin Nunes. Patel says that first of all, prosecutors overcharged the former president. As in, Whoa, 37 charges? That’s what overzealous prosecutors do. Well, yes, of course. Patel says, “They charged each separate document as one count. That’s going to be their calamitous regret.
And prosecutors have two different legal theories in the one indictment, hoping to convince a judge that he or she can pick one from the jurisprudential potluck table. “They have two separate legal theories in the same document in this one indictment, and they cannot both be true,” Patel says. “Either, he had classified documents unlawfully … or he did not,” he told John Solomon of Just the News. “It’s one or the other. You can’t have it both ways.”
Patel said, “In this charging document, they did not charge the president with unauthorized possession of classified documents.” They did a little legal jujitsu and took “an ancient statute in the National Defense Information Act – Espionage Act – and charge[d] him with improperly taking materials related to national defense information and ‘using them against the interest of the United States of America.’”
That’s a problem first of all, because past presidents can’t be charged with that. But life in the banana republic is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna git, Forrest.
Second, as legal commentator and constitution expert Mike Davis told me on my Adult in the Room Podcast (see below), Trump declassified the documents the feds wanted on the day before he left office.
Then President #Trump issued this memorandum 1/19/2021 on declassification FBI Crossfire Hurricane records. Circulated to AG, DNI, CIA. May now be relevant once full holdings from Monday search at Mar-a-Largo catalogued. https://t.co/riiagd8ct6 pic.twitter.com/T8YKrZptS7
— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) August 12, 2022
Coinkydinkally, it’s believed those unclassified Crossfire Hurricane documents were expected to be used as evidence to support Trump’s civil lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others. As Katherine Pompilio wrote over at Lawfare Blog, Trump sued them for executing “a plan to spread disinformation about his campaign during the 2016 presidential election and working together to disseminate false information to the American public that his campaign colluded with Russia to help him win the election ‘all in the hopes of destroying his life, his political career[,] and rigging the 2016 [p]residential [e]lection in favor of Hillary Clinton.’”
The judge threw out Trump’s lawsuit on Sept. 8, 2022 — exactly a month after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and took “eleven sets” of documents.
Later, Trump was be ordered to pay $1 million for bringing this “frivolous” suit against St. Hillary. The judge said that Trump engaged in a “’pattern of abuse of the courts’ for filing frivolous lawsuits for political purposes, which he said ‘undermines the rule of law’ and ‘amounts to obstruction of justice,’” Fortune reported.
Of course, the Durham Report confirmed all of these “frivolous” allegations that, well, “undermined the rule of law.”
Anyway, “That’s what this is all about,” Davis told me. “This idea that former presidents can’t have classified records is a smoke screen. It is complete and utter nonsense.”
“What harm would it cause to the United States that he had these documents at Mar-a-Lago?” Davis asks. “They were guarded by the Secret Service. They never leaked. They never leaked for 18 months. They didn’t leak until Biden ordered this illegal raid on him and stole these documents,” he notes.
“Again, the whole purpose for this raid was to get back Trump’s declassified and damning Crossfire Hurricane documents,” Davis told the Adult in the Room Podcast. “They were about to become public in Trump’s civil lawsuit versus Hillary Clinton. That [raid was run by] Jay Bratt at the [DOJ] National Security Division — the same National Security Division that helped run Crossfire Hurricane had to get back these documents.”
Trump may have had a beef with the National Archives (NARA), but Barack Obama wasn’t raided for keeping documents. Obama spent years negotiating with NARA which is, for those of you who went to Woke University, longer than the 18 months that Trump spent arguing with these people suffering from TDS. Yet Biden approved sending gunned-up FBI agents to the home of a former president to get papers he had to know Trump had every right to have, but which he didn’t want to get out.
Davis reiterated for the zillionth time, “The Presidential Records Act controls the presidential records by presidents and former presidents. The Espionage Act applies to everyone else.” He goes on, “It is not possible for a president or former president to commit espionage in how they handle their presidential records. It’s also not legally possible to generally commit obstruction of justice if you’re obstructing an investigation into a noncrime.” And here Davis gets to Patel’s point: “If it was not a crime for President Trump to have his presidential records — which it was not, it’s allowed by the Presidential Records Act — how can you obstruct justice into this non-crime?”
And he’s not spitballing. “That is not my legal theory,” Davis told me, “that is a binding legal opinion from 2019 at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.”
And, Davis said, the Department of Just Us is ignoring the other legal precedent from 2012. “They are ignoring the 2012 Clinton ‘sock drawer’ case,” he told me, “when Judicial Watch sued Bill Clinton for possessing 74 tapes from his presidency and [keeping] them in his sock drawer.” The judge threw out Judicial Watch’s case, Davis recounted. The judge basically said, “The mere fact that President Clinton took these records when he left office makes them personal … and it does not matter that they’re classified.” That decision is binding on D.C. federal courts.
This is another presidential election head fake by the left. This is the chaff we told you about.
More “charge Trump for what WE are doing” by the Democrats. Obscene.