I believe any prosecution would be for having them, not for selling them. Motive is not needed for successful prosecution.
GOTCHA-YA!
Yes, big factor here, it can’t be overstated how much others influence Trump’s affairs because he has little curiosity in anything that isn’t currently in the fore of his mind. A man that stupid and lazy can be made to do anything.
Good to hear! I was concerned that this post might bring the opposite reaction from a mod: “this topic has already been covered to death in the ‘Search and Seizure’ thread- closing”. And it might be for all I know- I was following the ‘Search and Seizure’ thread closely for awhile, but now I’m like 800+ posts behind on it.
While this is going to slightly contradict what I just said, I wonder how many of them know he’s lying but are convinced the left believes it. So, in their mind, they’re not actually gobbling it all up as if it’s the actual truth but rather using it as, what they believe to be, ammo against the other side.
But even then, they still don’t realize they’re getting played.
Do any of the potential charges against him not require intent? I understand that “Removing these documents with the intent of selling them” is hard to prove if they’ve just been sitting in a dresser drawer, but if it’s just “Removing these documents”, then intent is irrelevant.
IANAL, but as I understand it, ‘intent’ in the obstruction charge doesn’t require them to prove what future use Trump may have had in mind for keeping the documents – only that he willfully intended to not return them to their rightful owner (us). I think they’ve got more than ample evidence of that intent.
I was under the impression that some of the items were packed up when he left the White House for Mar-A-Lago, jumbled together indiscriminately. While some items were there already, the letter from Kim Jong-Un was something he brought with him.
Speaking of that letter, there are several reports of him showing that off to people at M-A-L, so I guess that’s #4 and #5.
Do not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by:
Add to that, as has been noted already, that Trump never understood that the President is not the Government. He never got that the President is actually just an employee of the Government, and in January 2021, he was supposed to just get his banker’s box of stuff and leave everything else at his old desk.
My hypothesis is that it’s a combination of him being pathologically secretive and contrarian as has been mentioned, and him having scribbled on a lot of these documents and him having selected them for his personal archive instead of shredding them. I also think whatever is in them is important to his motivation. Maybe there’s stuff like “our source in Kim Jong-Un’s” kitchen says Kim appears genuinely impressed with Trump’s power of will". Trump wants to hang on to it because it flatters him and has no concept of the risk it poses to US intelligence gathering and the life of the source. Maybe it’s just intelligence briefings that have in print a version of the sycophant litany we occasionally saw in recorded cabinet meetings.
Personally I doubt he had nefarious purposes for the documents, but he’s constantly proven to be beyond my ability to comprehend, so I wouldn’t be shocked if that proves to be wrong.
Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”, is one of my favorite adages or sayings. But in trump’s case, there is plenty of malice and stupidity in equal measure.
My favorite explanation of their mindset is a comparison to the “pigeon drop,” the famous con with many variations. In one of them, two conmen working in concert pretend to find an envelope of lost money in the presence of a third party, who is unknowingly the mark for the con. The mechanics vary, but the basic point is that one of the conmen takes the mark aside and suggests they scam the third guy. The mark knows there is a deception happening, but he thinks he’s helping to perpetrate it, and is unaware he’s actually the victim.
The application of this analogy to the Trump cultist is left as an exercise for the reader.
Even if there was no ill intent initially, that he just grabbed it out of stupidity/laziness, legally that is negligence leading to a massive security risk. And with all of that, I’m willing to bet that if he’d actually returned all the documents when asked, there would have been no squawking from the government. (Even though they could have charged him, I’m sure they would have wanted to avoid making this a big public spectacle for political purposes.)
It only got to where it is now because he refused to return them, he lied about returning them, he didn’t secure them, and when they came with a warrant to confiscate them, he broadcast that fact to the world. This is a nightmare of his making. And he is filing complaints which contain language that amounts to a confession. He’s practically indicting himself.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something, somewhere, that says ‘our source in Mar-a-Lago’s kitchen…’
Someone’s in the kitchen with Donny, strummin’ on the old banjo.
It’s particularly hilarious that, if he was showing them to people and bragging that he still had classified documents, now he’s doing a witch hunt for whoever ratted him out, when he’s the one who told people he had them.
But do not also dismiss malice as a reason just because other reasons are available.
Trump is generally lazy. He will always default to not doing something over doing it. So if classified documents were in his house while he was President, they would tend to stay there after he left office. This is especially true because when he left office, he also lost access to all the government staff that was around to pick up after him.
An additional factor is his ongoing refusal to admit he lost the election. Telling somebody to pack up government documents and send them back is an admission that he’s no longer the President.
That’s pretty spot on and almost exactly what the left has been telling the right since day 1. You’re [collectively] not fooling us, you’re the victim. How many times we’ve told them this every time he scams them for donations to look for voter fraud or tells a governor to help him out and he’ll endorse them.
Also, this, I assume, is another version of it from the beginning of Better Call Saul (not really a spoiler if anyone is concerned). Worth noting that this specific example relies on the mark knowing a Rolex is worth considerably more than $3000.
I thought Melania gave up music.
I thought motive didn’t count in criminal prosecutions, that it was more of a tool for investigators.