I’ve just read the superseding indictment, helpfully annotated by the NY Times by highlighting what was added. Based on that reading, it seems clear to me that the new charges are largely based around the testimony of “Trump Employee 4,” who is “believed to be an information technology expert at Mar-a-Lago named Yuscil Taveras.” In addition to that (supposed) testimony, they’ve got a bunch of vague text messages between Nauta and de Oliveira, and squirrelly travel moves by Nauta, but as enumerated seem circumstantial (though shady as hell, of course). I hope that they’ve got more corroboration of Taveras’ testimony than is laid out at the moment, because it seems a bit weak on the face of it, from a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standpoint.
FBI Search and Seizure at Trump's Mar-A-Lago Residence, August 8, 2022, Case Dismissed July 15, 2024
Remember the quaint old days when Republican Senators went to Nixon’s office and told him that they would not have the votes to prevent a conviction? These guys knew what Nixon did was wrong and they weren’t going to defend him so he had to go. Now Republicans have taken the position that no Republican president should have to face accountability for any crimes no matter what. I miss the old days where both parties had men of character.
the trial time moved from 21 days to 21-60 days on the indictment. if things start on may 20th, it could go to july 20th and beyond.
Not according to the emails I’ve been getting from him. It’s all a plot by the FBI against him but for one (unnamed) brave whistle-blower who told about the agency’s refusal to investigate the Biden crime family.
These are outnumbered by the emails from the Trump store where he’s selling various tchtotskies with his name on them, so I guess he’s not too worried about being convicted.
Yet.
From Slate (bolding mine):
The indictment details how the new defendant, de Oliveira, attempted to enlist Taveras in the newly charged obstruction by telling him, “The Boss wants to delete the server.”
…
You can be sure of three things. First, there’s only one “Boss” at Mar-a-Lago. Second, Taveras testified to those words to the grand jury, or it wouldn’t have included them in the superseding indictment. Last, Jack Smith will not be relying on the word of Taveras at trial without a mountain of corroboration.
There’s a lot more good stuff in the article about why this superseding indictment is a big deal, including wiping out the false comparisons of Trump’s behavior to Biden’s.
Another one: there are separate counts against Nauta and de Oliveira for making false statements to the FBI and destroying evidence. This opens the door to pleading guilty to a lesser crime if they decide it’s in their best interest (max penalty for a false statement is five years, max penalty for concealing/destroying grand jury evidence is 20 years).
There’s also the closing passages in the Slate article:
(Italics in the Slate article)
I wonder about one of those italic phrases: “Jack Smith has found it”. What he found was the plan of attack against Iran that Trump bragged about having to a reporter. Where did he find it? Did they do search of Bedminster which did not get in the news?
This is rather curious. Did they raid a new location? Was it one of the two documents that were found by Trump’s PIs? Or they just failed to identify it, before?
Could it be the case that the document had been recovered, but nobody who knew (more or less) what they were looking for actually had sufficient security clearance to look for/identify it? I could certainly imagine that the issue of security clearance could slow the process of finding the document down.
j
[Quoted from Slate article]
Whoa, Nelly! I hope that’s really true. Of course trump will keep saying he didn’t actually have it, it was planted, or it never existed, but that’s huge to me.
They’ve gotta’ flip (or examine at trial) the (several) people who were in the room that day.
It seems more likely than not that – while they may not have gotten to actually hold and read that National Defense Information Document (A Very Bad Thing) – they could probably say with some certainty that it was or wasn’t “newspaper clippings” and whatever other horseshit Trump claims it was.
Previously, the document had been missing—not recovered in the search of Mar-a-Lago—and Trump’s attorneys had said they couldn’t find it. Well, apparently now Jack Smith has found it.
I don’t think Dennis Aftergut (Slate) is correct here. I doubt he can support the statement that it was not recovered in the search of Mar-a-Lago.
“Defendant Trump’s counsel objects to the provisions in the proposed protective order that require them to discuss classified information with their client only within a SCIF,” the government writes. “They expressed concerns regarding the inconvenience posed by this limitation and requested that Defendant Trump be permitted to discuss classified information with his counsel in his office at Mar-a-Lago, and possibly Bedminster.
Wouldn’t want petty things like National security to be inconvenient, now, would we?
Send it to him, but redact the entire thing.
I’m trying to find a substantive way to excerpt this.
The government’s motion for a protective order is an excellent opportunity to begin educating the Court, including the judge’s staff, about CIPA and related issues. It is essential that the motion include a memorandum of law that provides the court with an overview on national security matters and sets forth the authority by which the government may protect matters of national security, including the general authority of the Intelligence Community (IC) pursuant to the National Security Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Act of 1949, and various Executive orders issued by the President. For sample motions and protective orders or to discuss any problems you may have with the court on CIPA issues, please contact the ISS. The protective order must be sufficiently comprehensive to ensure that access to classified information is restricted to cleared persons and to provide for adequate procedures and facilities for proper handling and protection of classified information during the pre-trial litigation and trial of the case.
[bolding mine]
SOURCE - SYNOPSIS OF THE CLASSIFIED INFORMATION PROCEDURES ACT (CIPA)
The superseding indictment added a 32nd count to the list of 31 national defense documents Trump kept. The new count is apparently the Iran document he blabbed about. The superseding indictment indicates he retained that document from January 20, 2021 to January 17, 2022.
January 17, 2022 is the date Trump returned the 15 boxes to the National Archives.
Did NARA assume those were decoy boxes and never look through them?
Can anyone help me recall when the blabbing was reported to have happened?
July 2021, sez PBS:
The recording, from a July 2021 interview Trump gave at his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort for people working on the memoir of his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, is a critical piece of evidence in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump over the mishandling of classified information.
That’s when the recoding was made, but prosecutors may not have known about it until some time after the doc was returned to NARA.