Hmmmm….I’m looking at the infamous photo and thinking…….was everything shown found in the same box? If so, did he have the documents concealed between framed pictures, like he was deliberately hiding them? Did the FBI open what looked to be an innocuous box of framed Time magazine covers, only to find out they were being used to conceal the documents? Just spitballing……
And Inside Edition was making fun of the carpet. I believe the phrase they used was “gaudy ‘80’s casino carpeting”. It looked kind of grungy, too…and the 80’s cabinet with the white textured front and silver pulls is horrendous.
That’s my impression. I hope so, otherwise the FBI will be accused of trying to infer that conclusion by including the box of frames with the classified docs.
My guess would be that the boxes were not labelled, or if they were, then the labels were not descriptive of the contents–likely something like, “2A,” “2B,” etc. So the boxes had to be opened to find out what the contents were. So, box 2A was found to contain documents, and box 2B was found to contain the Time covers.
Here’s the document she produced that newspaper journalists described in such a way:
She does not say that she has decided to appoint a special master nor that she leans towards appointing one. She warns the government that she’s in the preliminary stages of appointing a special master, pending the outcome of briefs, and that they should hold off on inspecting the documents while the matter is under consideration. They should act with the expectation that one is coming - i.e. they should act as though they have no right to view the documents - so long as the request is under deliberations.
If my lawyer says, “Expect to get destroyed in court if you wear that shirt.” He doesn’t mean that he’s planning to take a hammer to my knees when we get into the courtroom, unless I change my clothes. He’s warning me of a likely outcome that I will have to contend with, in the universe, and that I might want to make different choices to avoid them.
Likewise, the judge saying that she’s in a preliminary stage of appointing a special master doesn’t mean that she’s planning to appoint one, she’s just warning that it could happen and that everyone should act with that possibility in mind.
One explanation I’ve heard that sounds reasonable about why this judge made her preliminary “leaning this way” statement (via a minute order, I believe), is that she learned her craft in California. It’s routine in some California venues for judges to issue such statements in an effort to get the parties to narrow their focus on the areas she finds concerning. She may simply have fallen back on this practice.
I think I said previously in this thread that in essence, she may have been soliciting a road map by either or both parties on how they wished her to rule. DOJ certainly seems to have obliged.
NARA = National Archives and Records Administration. The organization that set off this whole thing by asking for these documents and getting stonewalled.
lardo = Reference to Trump’s obesity
I notice the equity argument is invoked on page 6.
The old saw… if the law is on your side, argue the law. If the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If nothing is on your side, pound the table and argue for equity!
But the Government reads into the Presidential Records Act an enforcement provision that does not exist;
the law exhorts a former President to interface with the Archivist to ensure the preservation of Presidential records, but it does not oblige the former President to take any particular steps with respect to those records.
Seems that the government discovered an enforcement provision after all, even if the former President did not take any particular steps with respect to the records. Who knew?
I’ve read only a couple of pages, but it reads like trump wrote it, then his lawyers cleaned it up. It has his style of use of quotation marks and reads the same way as his complaints on social media, just with legalese around it.
When I read that tweet (Truth Social post? I’m not sure), no matter how much I want it to be the case, there’s no admission in there.
He claims the FBI took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet. He never admits to the cartons already being there or that they were in his possession before the FBI showed up. If you wanted to push the ‘they were planted’ theory, this tweet would still work.
It’s the difference (IMHO) between “your honor, I didn’t leave cocaine laying out on my kitchen table like that” vs “your honor, I didn’t leave my cocaine…” or “your honor, that cocaine was in my sock drawer, the cops put in on the kitchen table to make it look like I just left it laying around”.
Having said that, I still think he was, in fact, saying that he had them neatly stored in cartons and the FBI spread them out on the floor to make it look like he just carelessly left them laying out on the floor. IOW, he was defending the accusation (or implication) that he’s a slob.
I don’t think it would take more than a small nudge to get him to clarify (admit) that he had them neatly boxed up, not laying around like that.
My first impression was that they were all stacked standing up in the box. As to why they were packed together, maybe it was so that if someone was coming in who he wanted to impress with his presidential, he would hang up the frames and scatter some documents with top secret cover pages around on the desk and tables.
"Oh those? You probably shouldn’t see those. Top secret you know, that’s the most secret there is. I guess I’ll have to kill you now ha! ha!. They come by every couple of days to drop one off. ‘Sir’, they say, ‘the nation’s in trouble and Biden’s not capable of handling it, we need you to tell us what we should do’.
Since neither he nor any of his attorneys were present during the search, how does he know whether the FBI took them out of cartons or Redweld envelopes or duffel bags, unless he knows that they were in cartons because he knows the cartons?