I don’t see why he would, which is to say, of course, I don’t see why he wouldn’t. In fact he did, as the National Archives has confirmed. What could go wrong with a transactional, money hungry, deeply in debt, beleagured, compulsive liar having a trove of top-secret national security information for over a year in his private villa? What could go wrong?

Colbert I. King lays out the answers in a piece he calls What worries me most about the classified information discovered at Mar-a-Lago (link below).

https://wapo.st/3HiMqAg

Clear legal analysis from Jennifer Rubin in a recent Washington Post, laying out the reasons Judge Amit Mehta’s recent ruling against the strained claims of our obsessive ex-president is bad news for 45. Mehta ruled that Trump is not immune from a lawsuit under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which provides punishment for conspiracy to deprive parties of their Fourteenth Amendment rights. Here that violation was done by intimidating officials and preventing them from carrying out their legal duties. The op ed, Trump’s legal problems are about to get much worse, is well worth a read.

Of the angry ex-president’s argument that he is absolutely immune from the lawsuit since he was acting in his official capacity as president when he whipped up an angry mob he’d assembled, Judge Mehta set out several ways the rally and riot were beyond the scope of presidential duties:

[Trump] repeatedly tweeted false claims of election fraud and corruption, contacted state and local officials to overturn election results, and urged the Vice President to send Electoral ballots back for recertification. The President communicated directly with his supporters, inviting them to Washington, D.C., to a rally on January 6, the day of the Certification, telling them it would be “wild.” He directly participated in the rally’s planning, and his campaign funded the rally with millions of dollars. At the rally itself, the President gave a rousing speech in which he repeated the false narrative of a stolen election. The crowd responded by chanting and screaming, “Storm the Capitol,” “Invade the Capitol,” “Take the Capitol right now,” and “Fight for Trump.” Still, the President ended his speech by telling the crowd that “we fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Almost immediately after these words, he called on rally-goers to march to the Capitol to give “pride and boldness” to reluctant lawmakers “to take back our country.” Importantly, it was the President and his campaign’s idea to send thousands to the Capitol while the Certification was underway. It was not a planned part of the rally. In fact, the permit expressly stated that it did “not authorize a march from the Ellipse.” From these alleged facts, it is at least plausible to infer that, when he called on rally-goers to march to the Capitol, the President did so with the goal of disrupting lawmakers’ efforts to certify the Electoral College votes.

as to Trump’s First Amendment claim:

Having considered the President’s January 6 Rally Speech in its entirety and in context, the court concludes that the President’s statements that, “[W]e fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and “[W]e’re going to try to and give [weak Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country,” immediately before exhorting rally-goers to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” are plausibly words of incitement not protected by the First Amendment. … It is reasonable to infer that the President would have known that some supporters viewed his invitation as a call to action …

So, when the President said to the crowd at the end of his remarks, “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” moments before instructing them to march to the Capitol, the President’s speech plausibly crossed the line into unprotected territory.

From a recent Washington Post, generously gifted to you by the supremely generous Jeff Bezos

https://wapo.st/3p17cyf

The list of the Orange Polyp’s crimes, even just since the end of the tempestuous four years of his Thousand Year Reich, is impressive.  Because he’s done them publicly, and never been held accountable for any violation of law, he’s pushed back the line on what a president can “legally” do.   

We easily forget that at one time a president publicly telling all subpoenaed witnesses into his misdeeds to just not show up, to defy legal subpoenas and fight them in court until the clock runs out, would have been grounds for obstruction of justice charges.   The media hardly blinks when it is revealed that Trump took classified documents out of the White House (and destroyed many others during his tumultuous term) when he sulked off to Florida, something that would previously have been front-page news day after day, amid calls for a Special Prosecutor.

Recall that before his first impeachment he made it “normal” to intimidate a witness testifying in Congress (in an inquiry into what became his first impeachment) in real time, as she was testifying.   “Marie Yavonovich is going to go through some things.”   That was after Rudy, working with buddies Lev and Igor (both quietly being prosecuted, or perhaps already having taken pleas) orchestrated the corrupt outster of the sitting US Ambassador to Ukraine, a diplomat with impeccable credentials, amid threats on her life. They did this as part of a plan to get Ukrainian president Zelensky to announce a fake investigation into Biden’s son, pursuant to a perfect phone call to him.  At orders of Trump, who really didn’t know anything about it, but Rudy had told him “Igor says this bitch has to go” and Trumpie gave his hyenas the word to smear Yavonovich and then he fired her.  In the preceding couple of sentences alone there are probably several different felonies, for an ordinary president.

The delay in prosecuting Trump for anything (although the legal walls do seem to be closing in on America’s classiest former president) is frustrating, with all the crimes he appears to have committed just since he lost the election in 2020.  The only reassuring legal take I heard was from former DOJ prosecutor Joyce Vance explaining how long it takes to build a racketeering case under RICO that can’t  be undone on appeal.  RICO allows prosecutors to show that a mob boss making seemingly innocuous statements like “things could get bad for her” is the same as an order to do bad things to her. It is apparently not hard to indict and convict under RICO, but, according to Vance, it’s also not hard for a team of smart lawyers to get a RICO conviction dismissed on a hundred technicalities.  So maybe Merrick Garland really intends to bring an airtight RICO prosecution against MAGA man and his capos, in which case, we’re only about a year or two away from a big announcement.   Hopefully Garland won’t be announcing it from the glitzy new Trump Auschwitz.

As Lyin’ Ted snarled at the mild-mannered Garland in a Senate hearing: what’s the country coming to when you can’t even give an innocent, Constitutionally protected Nazi salute to a bunch of liberal kikes and woke n-words at a School Board meeting?

Follow this brief illustrated timeline, if you will.    It starts with Michael Flynn, US General, retired, Trump’s first National Security Advisor.   Trump fired him 22 days in for lying to Mike Pence about illegal contacts with Russia, lies he later repeated to the FBI, as he had previously done on his security clearance filings that neglected to mention he was on the payroll of Turkey and Russia.  Trump asked James Comey to do him a favor and give this good guy a pass by not investigating him, Comey refused and Trump kicked his ass to the curb, leading to the Mueller Witch HUNT.   

Stephen Miller, hateful troll, was one of very few Trump insiders who was there at the president’s side the entire four years of Trump’s Thousand Year Administration.

Bannon, Trump’s master tactician, was fired for getting too much attention for being “Trump’s brain”– the boss had already revealed that the way to be the smartest man in the room was to hire the best people, as long as they were dumber than you.   

Bill Barr was an exception, being very smart, and something of a magician, he made the damning conclusions, and the many incriminating details, of the Mueller Report vanish into thin air.  Among other feats of legerdemain he also did his damnedest to orchestrate a lawyerly, shamelessly partisan withdrawal of Flynn’s guilty plea for perjury, before the Big Guy pardoned Flynn outright.  In the end, Barr bailed as the roof was blowing off the booby hatch, and it was another Trump-appointee,

Jefferey Clark, who stepped up to take the reins and promote any lie Trump wanted on DOJ letterhead, to create pressure to throw out the votes in states Trump lost.  Clark later had a few months of projectile diarrhea that made it impossible for him, for medical reasons, to appear before the House Select Committee on the Trump riot to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.   

Rudy, one of Trump’s best buddies, who brought several of the post election Stop the Steal court cases that Trump lost, had previously traveled to Ukraine to meet Paul Manafort’s old friends among the Russian oligarch-connected Ukrainians, and with Lev and Igor, Mafia Rave and Fraud Guarantee, dig up some smut on Biden’s surviving son.  His lawyers are currently negotiating the scope of his voluntary cooperation with the ongoing House witch hunt.

Convicted felon Paul Manafort knew every corrupt official and oligarch in Ukraine and Russia from his years grooming the corrupt, Russian oligarch-backed Viktor Yanukovych to become president of Ukraine. As the GOP-chaired Senate Committee Report revealed, Manafort worked closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, Putin’s guy, during his time as Trump’s campaign manager.   Roger “Ratfucker” Stone, another pardoned felon, worked closely with Oath Keepers now under indictment for seditious conspiracy, among other things they guarded his grotesque person on January 5th and 6th.   The baseless Democrat [sic] witch hunt continues!   

Meanwhile this smiling John McEntee fellow was promoted from Trump’s bag man, body man, to Czar of loyalty to Trump, working closely with the wife of Clarence Thomas to root out insufficiently loyal Republicans throughout the West Wing and beyond. 

In happier days, and for most of Trump’s term, he was well protected by the powerful, unscrupulous Senate majority leader, now, like so many others Trump feels have betrayed him, his enemy.

In the end, he was left with crackpot theories about the Twelfth Amendment and the Hail Mary of the “Green Bay Sweep” (and coordinated riot) to overturn the 2020 presidential election (oddly, all the other Republicans elected on the same ballots were immune to the massive, coordinated, bipartisan anti-Trump fraud), this guy invoked his Fifth Amendment right countless times and is fighting the release of thousands of possibly incriminating emails.  Here’s the latest on him, from Heather Cox Richardson:

Lawyer John Eastman, who produced the infamous memo with a blueprint for Pence to overturn the election, has claimed that he cannot produce the documents the January 6th committee has subpoenaed because of attorney-client privilege. The judge overseeing the case has ordered him to document those attorney-client relationships by February 22.

Bill Barr left in place the stern-looking, arch conservative, Christian dominionist DOJ Special Counsel John Durham (who Trump praises as “Robert Durham”) to get to the corrupt oringes of the Mueller investigation total witch hunt. Durham has been at it longer than Mueller was (traveling with Barr to Italy, at one point, in search of smoking gun proof of the distractionary partisan witch hunt theory), and had found approximately zilch, though FOX and friends are running hard with the story of his single seeming revelation, a shaky theory about Hillary spying on Donald in the White House before he was even president (and they’re in a hurry to exploit this “bombshell,” ignored by the leftist mass media, before that indictment likely gets dismissed next week). Why this right wing fucknut is still on the “case” is one of the enduring mysteries of American politics. 

Bannon was in the Willard Hotel war room on January 5th and 6th, back in the command center of Trump’s brain, with Rudy, pardoned felon Bernard Kerik, Fifth Amendment and shaky attorney-client privilege citer John Eastman and some of the other best people. 

And Mike Flynn, the good guy who started the whole shit show (after leading chants of “Lock Her Up!” at the Republican National Convention back in the day), has not been restored to active service for the court martial the Q-Anon general so richly deserves (and which Glenn Kirschner made a strong case for).  He’s out there exercising his First Amendment right to advocate martial law, the essential white Christianity of this exceptional nation, the truth of Q’s droppings, to talk absolute shit about whatever pops into his head.   

God bless these United Shaysssh.

February 14th 2022, Glenn Kirschner, former federal prosecutor reminds us, is the statute of limitations deadline for filing obstruction of justice charges based on the Mueller report which documented at least ten fairly clear-cut instances of obstruction by the Orange Polyp. The obstruction case about which Mueller wrote that it was unfair to accuse the president of while he couldn’t actually charge him, but that he also could not exonerate him for. This is what Bill Barr judged to be complete and total exoneration of Trump.

Seeing as Trump’s obstruction of justice is seamless and ongoing, using legal, quasi-legal and extralegal means, as illustrated most recently in his ignoring the Presidential Records Act (after ascertaining, no doubt, that there is no real penalty for violating it, with the usual caveat that covering up a crime is a separate felony) it would seem the statute of limitations should not be a factor in charging him with obstruction of justice, Merrick.

Someone who has never been held accountable for anything in his life understandably believes that accountability is only for fucking losers. Plus, he has the best people.

Council for National Policy member Steve Bannon, whose billionaire patrons the Mercers threw their support behind Trump as the last candidate standing, for example. The Mercers introduced the canny authoritarian Bannon (and fellow CNP member Kelleyanne Alternative Fact) to the Trump campaign. In exchange for the CNP’s help, Trump, who truly believes in nothing, agreed to appoint Federalist Society judges to the bench, limit his religious advisory Council to only Protestants, cut taxes on the super-rich and support a variety of other far-right positions.

Bannon was one of the keys to Trump’s narrow, surgically crafted Electoral College victory, but was soon fired by the thin-skinned Trump when he became known as Trump’s brain. Trump dubbed Bannon Sloppy Steve. And, yet, three years later, it was Sloppy Steve who sat in a suite in the Willard Hotel, the command center for the January 6th insurrection, who later told the House Select Committee on January 6th that it was illegitimate and to go fuck itself with its subpoena, and who’d secured a pardon from Trump on Trump’s last day in office. Pardoned, you know, for making a little money by ripping off the most loyal, and most credulous, of Trumps die-hard 39%. As you do.

Legitimate political discourse, baby.