I wonder how this interacts with Article 2 section 1 clause 5 of the Constitution, setting out requirements to be a president? For reference:
On the one hand, those seem to be necessary conditions, not sufficient conditions, so the law you quoted doesn’t directly contradict them. On the other hand, I can certainly imagine Trumpists arguing that a constitutional amendment is required to put further limitations on who can become president, and I’m not 100% sure which was the supreme court would go.
Do we think it’s beneath Trump to take documents that he could sell to our country’s opponents? I wish I wasn’t so unsure about the answer to this question.
This may end up not being that big of a deal but I do think that this is evidence that the DOJ noose is tightening. In particular, I think it’s increasingly likely that insider goons like Manafort and Meadows are spilling the beans.
Of course he doesn’t understand Thing One about Watergate. And the movie All the President’s Men is way too slow and talky for him to watch.
He thinks Watergate means, Everybody was mean to the President and now they’re being mean to me!
Here’s the thing:
There have been complaints on this board that the FBI isn’t doing anything/enough and certainly not fast enough or publicly enough. And the apologists have been saying, “The FBI and the DOJ don’t do everything in public with flashing lights and a commentary of sound bites like on TV cop shows.”
Well, consider this: if trumpy hadn’t announced to the world that the FBI was searching Mar-a-Lago and rifling through his underwear drawer, we might very well not know this was happening at all!
Trumpy blew the whistle on himself, because he wants to be seen as a martyr and a victim. But the FBI/DOJ was just doing its job like it’s supposed to: quietly and professionally without publicity, comment, or fanfare. A buncha black SUVs show up at Donnie’s house-- big deal. If any news media had asked, they would have been stonewalled by the FBI. Yeah, maybe a leak-- although there haven’t been enough leaks to satisfy critics of DOJ procedure. It was Donnie who kicked the cat, screaming, out of the bag.
So the people who are complaining that the DOJ isn’t showing its hand every step of the way (pardon the mixed metaphor) can just take a chill pill and grok that the gummint cops are doing their job methodically and professionally.
I suspect it was more along the lines of, “Well, if you’re not going to give them back (semi-)voluntarily, at least make sure no one else steals them before our guys come back with a warrant.”
Really? I didn’t know that. I didn’t start hearing anything about it until after I saw this thread and when I did a quick (clearly, too quickly) search to see what time it happened at, all I saw were pictures taken at night. Though I suppose those could have just been local cops remaining there in case things got violent.
A riot might gets his followers worked up, but isn’t going to help him and only going to hurt him (see: 1/6 riot). But if he thought he could get them worked up enough that the FBI would decide to walk away from the case because it’s more trouble than it’s worth…the early stages of the next coup?
That seemed odd to me too. A random thought I had is that doing something like that could make trump think ‘if that was their only problem, they must be okay with me holding on to them’. Make him think he’s in the clear so he doesn’t move/destroy them.
If the materials are simply incriminating, full stop, he has no reason to keep them. He may be a moron, but he’s not stupid. If the documents can put him in prison and have no other value, he simply burns them. Something else has to be going on.
If the DOJ already knew the documents were there then they knew that he took them, and all of that open knowledge could have precluded him from burning them outright. But I agree, if it was just about these documents and the DOJ knew exactly where they were, then the FBI wouldn’t need to do a 9 hour raid.
I’m not a lawyer. But there are some pretty good legal writers on the internet. Here’s one site that’s seems to know what they’re writing about:
The most relevant statute discussed seems to be 18 U.S. Code §2071. Concealment, removal, or mutilation.
It states:
Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.
From what I’ve been reading, the National Archives request for the return of the boxes of federal documents from Mar-a-Lago was made several months ago. It also seems that the boxes weren’t moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago as Trump was leaving office, but were brought to Mar-a-Lago during Trump’s presidency when he used Mar-a-Lago as his Florida retreat. It was even discussed in the SDMB a few months ago.
Refusal to act on a demand from the National Archives doesn’t seem to be a crime. If they knew about these boxes of documents for months, then they weren’t being concealed. For the removal charge, the DOJ has to prove that Trump ordered the boxes moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when he was leaving office, instead of being there all along. That leaves “mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys”. So it basically comes down to whether Trump or an assigned minion was going through the boxes and taking out things that belonged to the National Archive that Trump didn’t want them to have. Absent a witness testifying that happened, that’s going to be pretty hard to prove. I don’t think missing documents listed in an index will rise to the standard needed to prove a crime.
My guess is that Trump, through his lawyers, will say that the boxes contained a mix of presidential and personal records, and he wanted to go through the boxes and remove the personal records, but just hadn’t got around to it. He may get charged on something else, but I doubt he gets charged based on a violation related to the Federal Records Act.
I’m not buying this whole “MAGAts will riot in the streets” trope. (No matter how much Fox News tries to make it happen.) The Jan. 6 traitors had one location to draw them, and a months-long campaign to get them there. Spontaneous mass marches in state capitals because Trump’s place got raided? Not seeing it. Not even when he gets indicted. Random violence, probably.
Of course, if MAGAts do want to peacefully march in protest of a likely felon being indicted, I encourage them to do so. It’s a free country.
Specifically, the law in question — Section 2071 of Title 18 of the United States Code — makes it a crime if someone who has custody of government documents or records “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys” them.
If convicted, defendants can be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. In addition, the statute says, if they are currently in a federal office, they “shall forfeit” that office, and they shall “be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
The article also discusses how conservatives got over-excited about this law in 2015 due to Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but nothing came of it.
My takeaway is that the “prevents Trump from holding federal office again” part of this is sadly much murkier than it looks at face value, for exactly the reasons LHoD stated.
Well, yeah, after that inspection where federal agents confirmed the documents’ presence and nature (and demanded increased security), then destruction is off the table.
But before then? I dunno. Given the overwhelming aura of sausage-fingered ineptitude that suffused every single thing undertaken by this bunch of clowns, if they’d said prior to that inspection that “we had em somewhere, we think we sent em back to the White House, or maybe the CIA, or something, we’re honestly not sure,” I don’t think anything greater than negligent stupidity would have stuck. That is when Trump would have dumped the docs down the outhouse, unless he had a specific reason/purpose for keeping them.
Point is, barring more specific revelations, I will continue to be skeptical that Trump held onto this material solely due to keep it out of other people’s view. Again, he’s a moron, but he’s not stupid. If it’s not useful, and it’s simply incriminating, it’s ash.
