No idea. It would likely depend on exactly what her involvement was, what she was told by Trump staff handling the docs, and whether her conclusion was reasonable or a blind eye.
I have no idea what the applicable federal statute might be. She could also potentially be facing bar sanctions, I suppose?
Or in other words, for a propaganda outfit, that’s a very well-written headline.
This is the kind of breathless alarmism that I take issue with:
POTENTIALLY MASSIVE in light of what we know now:
In Oct 2021, CIA Counterintelligence sent a top secret cable warning an unusually number of confidential informants were being killed, captured, or compromised.
In Jan 2021, Trump stole documents on these kind of informants.
Maybe he’s “just asking questions.” This is the kind of crap I hoped “my side” was above.
(I saw this on reddit, not twitter. I don’t know who this guy is)
eta: I’m guessing that this tweet was in response to that NYT headline posted above.
I predicted the insurrection just 6 days after the 2020 election. My strategy of assuming the worst from Donald Trump, has rarely been put to a serious test. I do not find anything wrong with Mr. Snell’s obvious speculation, he is an American citizen, and he does have that right.
Just sayin’. ‘No, Trump wouldn’t go that far’ has been a losing debate ploy for 7 years now.
While wearing briefs, I hope. (Actually, I don’t really care… Be comfy, I say.)
Good work! 
Then you’re back in the position of asserting that the DOJ is grossly incompetent and possibly has blood on their hands.
eta: This whole case has moved about at the expected pace of librarians trying to get their property back. If Trump was literally giving the names of confidential informants to our enemies and those informants were being murdered, and anyone had the slightest indication that Trump may be involved, then holy shit. What a scandal for the FBI.
Unless you’re a lawyer with some sort of specialty in national security law, then you’re just guessing. There’s a lot of other guessing going on too – there’s nothing wrong with guessing. But that’s all it is.
There was a lot of guessing going on with Hillary’s emails too. Some types of guessing are bad for the country.
Yes.
This is messy. And it’s not the DOJ who stole the documents. So this complaint about the DOJ is baseless, as already noted above: the criminal is responsible for the crime.
Wow. OK then.
As I’ve tried to show in the timeline, investigations take time to develop. The investigators have to gather the evidence, they have to interview potential witnesses, they have to respect legal restrictions on their abilities to investigate, both normal ones, like the 4th Amendment, and in this case, extraordinary ones, like executive privilege and the Presidential Records Act.
Document-heavy cases are some of the most complicated ones to investigate, particularly when the object of the investigation is wealthy and powerful, and can call up resources that the average person cannot.
Investigations often have a tipping point, where what looks initially suspicious transitions to probable cause.
My guess is that there was something in those interviews in June, coupled with the surveillance video, that was the tipping point, where the FBI agents concluded that they had sufficient grounds, at least for the warrant, but also possibly for the indictment.
And in the context of this case, that would be an “Oh, shit!” moment, followed by “Who’s going to talk to the AG about it?”
Ok. Glad we are in agreement. Former Presidents should not steal records, and if the former president has already shown a propensity to overthrow the government, then:
Agreement and understanding at last, we can put our phones/keyboards down and enjoy our Saturday.
The NY Times today has an article specifically about the issue of obstruction (gift link). Some quotes:
Unredacted portions of the affidavit underlying the Mar-a-Lago search warrant point to a crime that has been overshadowed amid disputes over classified information.
The 38-page affidavit, released on Friday, asserted that there was “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at” Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound, indicating that prosecutors had evidence suggesting efforts to impede the recovery of government documents.
But by some measures, the crime of obstruction is as, or even more, serious a threat to Mr. Trump or his close associates.
Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in white-collar crime, said the emerging timeline of the government’s repeatedly stymied attempts to retrieve all the documents, coupled with claims by Mr. Trump that he did nothing wrong because he had declassified all the documents in his possession, presented significant legal peril for him.
This is improbable due to Trump and his cronies having too much of a combination of incompetence + believing he’s above the law.
Awesome summary, @Northern_Piper (of course!). Thank you for putting it together. I’ve bookmarked it, as I know many others have. Very nicely done.
Not to mention Trump.
Wait, so this means that there is no exhaustive list of every document, even the sensitive or classified ones, correct? Otherwise, wouldn’t Archives know exactly which documents were missing and provide specific references to them? I would have thought that there would be very clear records of every classified document (obviously numbered or coded such that the content is not identifiable).
Claims include the allegation that the disc contained child pornography. And Hunter’s admission that the Bidens have been paid tens of millions in bribery from various sources, including $30M from China.
And the FBI who looked at the disc and took no action and many different media companies who have refused to report on the story are all part of the conspiracy.
It sounds as if Trump was in the habit of keeping documents from briefings, and not always returning them, so it may not have been clear that he still had the classified docs.
Note that the first specific documents referred to by counsel to the Archives, in may 2022, were very well-known ones that they didn’t have: Kim’s letter, and Obama’s farewell note, not classified docs.
Just going to echo the replies. How this happened, and the time it took, is what happens when you decide (or realize) the only way you’re going to get these documents back is to have probable cause* the ex-President is committing a crime.
For me personally, I don’t like that this happened. It opens the door for political abuse in future administrations. It will happen again. It will probably happen again for abusive reasons. So, as Obama said, there’s classified and then there’s classified. This better have been something very serious.
*That’s the legal standard, but in this case, I imagine there was essentially a zero percent chance he was not committing a crime/had sensitive documents.