And this is my fear - that he’ll magically skate through all of this untouched and his supporters will feel vindicated and emboldened.
FBI Search and Seizure at Trump's Mar-A-Lago Residence, August 8, 2022, Case Dismissed July 15, 2024
Trumpers: “I’ma assume he means the libruls and the coloreds. Yee haw!”
Yebbut - any building that close to the coast will not have a basement - unless you want an unintentional indoor pool.
Ah - like the time he tried to encourage his followers to get vaccinated. After Biden made a big show of gratitude to his administration for getting the vaccine ball rolling. Suddenly he became the sole inventor of the vaccine… until he was booed for mentioning it.
Well, they did boo him when he said they should get vaccinated. Obviously they still stuck with him but many of his supporters clearly didn’t like that.
If he suddenly sounded rational and said things that were responsible and helpful, I suspect he’d be done politically and that would be the end of MAGA.
Re: the drained swimming pool/flooded server room
Ignoring for the moment that it’s hard to imagine there’s no offsite (eg, cloud) storage/backup …
I took a look at the Federal rules for Spoliation - 33pp PDF (“The destruction or alteration of evidence resulting from a party’s failure to preserve evidence relevant to a litigation or investigation.”)
If there is spoliation of evidence – as it appears we have here – then there’s often an “adverse inference” jury instruction given, telling the jury – in effect – that they may feel free to assume that the evidence destroyed would have been painfully unfavorable to the defendant.
[NB: Assume the worst? About Trump? Can you imagine …?]
In some jurisdictions, IIRC, this sanction is dependent on a judge’s determination of bad faith. It doesn’t appear that this is the case in the Federal Courts – it may not depend at all on the defendant’s state of mind:
Instead, it is the relationship between the degree of prejudice suffered by the innocent party and the mindset of the responsible party when engaging in the destructive acts that is controlling in the imposition of spoliation sanctions on a party. These countervailing factors are balanced in order to determine an appropriate sanction in particular circumstances.
So pretend like I didn’t say basement, but rather just that it’s not unheard of to have pool equipment indoors.
And not that I want to defend them, but it could have even been something like the equipment being outside, but physically near the server room or, if I had to guess, they drained it too fast (perhaps on purpose), overwhelming the drain lines and it simply backed up into the server room (maybe it’s the lowest on the property).
Or more likely it’s just BS, someone deleted the date, broke the server and dumped some water on the floor to make it look like their was a flood.
In any case, my reply to Railer13 wasn’t to say that’s what happened, just that it’s not unheard of.
According to this article, Mar-a-Lago has three basements, which are at or near sea level.
This is Trump we’re talking about. He could find a way to drain a swimming pool and flood an attic.
Color me surprised. I’m going to have to take back my criticism of Day of the Dead for being set in an underground military facilitiy in Florida.
It’s almost certainly BS. All the pools I’ve worked at had a separate drainage system, often into a storm sewer. When you drain a pool, or even backwash the filters, a shit load of water gets dumped, and there is no way a six inch sewer pipe would be able to handle it. It would take a plumbing error of catastrophic proportions and a miracle for a pool draining to affect a server room.
At the very least can we hope that the judge can impose some restrictions on profiting from his crimes like they did with the January 6th crew?
I too am struggling with the logistics of this. Either (most likely) it’s all bullshit, or Mar-A-Lago is spectacularly badly designed and cheaply built (less likely but still plausible).
Presumably they could be made to explain with diagrams and photos and the reanimated corpse of Rose Mary Woods exactly how this happened.
haaaaa, hah, ha,ha. And of course we ALL know that the best place for data servers is in a warm moist envionment.
Keeps data soft and supple.
Moist.
Oh, the Deep State has suppressed that, just the way they did news of the Bowling Green massacre.
I may have to amend my analysis a bit. On Google Earth, I count one pool on the property. It looks to be about 20’ x 60’ with a six foot deep end. I worked at swim clubs and rec center pools which all had swim teams, so they were much bigger. Don’t get me wrong - this is a good sized pool, but it is still residential sized. I don’t even see a pump house for it, so the pump and filters can’t be very big. That said, it would still have to drain downhill, which would be towards the putting green it looks like.
In short - my initial assessment of the amount of water the pool would drain was off by quite a bit, but the water would still have to either flow uphill or a hose pipe would be needed for a pool draining to affect the server room.
Unlikely, because Trump didn’t build it.
And on the floor in said room, not in elevated racks.
OK, what’s up with ‘moist’? I keep hearing/reading people commenting that they hate the word. Due to the ‘moistfully good’ commercials when I was little, I associate ‘moist’ with Dunca Hines cake mix.