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Monday, August 29, 2022

[UPDATED] Howie Klein at DWT asks one of the hard questions about Trump. If he held a shitload of secret stuff, how was he intending to monetize it?

Link. Why trust he did not seek to monetize things? What's his track record?

It is interesting how the host of Republicans having shown an outrage show over the search is shrinking in terms of current news. They know who the FBI and DOJ are dealing with.

I am not defaming the man by saying he did such and such. I don't know. The worry that this individual held stuff that possibly could be monetized by unprincipled conduct is all I see. Innocent unless proven guilty.

What has the FBI and DOJ walking on egg shells is if a criminal trial arises how hard it will be to get a jury without one or more who'd hang a jury, trial or retrial. 

People for some reason believe Trump, or think him a hero. Beyond reasonable belief, the nation has many more who'd have gone into the Capitol when incited to do so. They simply were not there at the time.

________UPDATE________

DWT at another recent post began

As North Carolina former Congressman Brad Miller noted this morning, “No one who played inside the lines had Roy Cohn for a lawyer.” I’m guessing historian Steven Beschloss would agree with him, having tweeted something many of us have been thinking today “We have no reason to assume he isn’t still holding stolen documents in other locations.”

Roy Cohn. Does anyone know how Jarad's hedge fund is doing? How it is fee structured? Jarad does management services, charges fees. At least two billion invested in the fund, up front, on Jarad's track record. 666 Fifth Ave., etc.

___________FURTHER UPDATE_________

WaPo, here and here, showing a pattern of Trump disdain for records law applying to him by doing all he could to overcome restrictions on "The Boss." The first WaPo item focuses upon tearing up documents as the urge struck him, aides trying to recover decorum and conformance to law. The latter post stated mid-item - 

“Any documents that made it to the White House residence were these boxes Trump carried around with him,” explained Stephanie Grisham, a former senior White House staffer. “Usually the body man would have brought them upstairs for Trump or someone from the outer-Oval at the end of the day. They would get handed off to the residence and just disappear.”

Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.

“There was no rhyme or reason — it was classified documents on top of newspapers on top of papers people printed out of things they wanted him to read. The boxes were never organized,” Grisham said. “He’d want to get work done on long trips so he’d just rummage through the boxes. That was our filing system.”

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in refusing to turn over documents, at times suggesting that the records are his and should not be given back to the Archives.

However, not even some of Trump’s closest advisers anticipated that what they viewed as a bureaucratic dust-up with archivists would snowball into a serious FBI investigation for potentially violating federal law in removing and retaining classified documents without authorization — a felony punishable by five years in prison.

He held onto stuff and stalled and obstructed reasonable concerns over security. He was "The Boss," and the laws were nagging by underlings. Until the warrant, search and seizure.

While having cause to look at Trump with a skeptic's eye, Michael Cohen in reporting stated his guess of some things already compromised -

 

Michael Cohen, former President Donald Trump's personal lawyer for 12 years, believes Trump may have given away top-secret information while traveling around the world during his tenure in the White House.

In a TikTok on Monday, Cohen reacted to a recent article by The Washington Post that reported on how Trump would take unorganized boxes of classified documents with him on overseas trips and store them in hotel rooms, even in countries that were considered adversaries to the US.

Stephanie Grisham, who served as White House press secretary under Trump, also told the Post that documents the former president sent for would often "just disappear."

Cohen said in his TikTok: "Let me be very clear, considering I know this 'Mandarin Mussolini' extremely well. Donald doesn't take boxes of material around the world for no reason at all. He took it for nefarious reasons."

"I stand firm when I say that Donald wants to use this in order to hold the country hostage," he later said. "That's his goal. His goal, because he knows his ass is in the grinder right now. He knows that he's cooked, that he's going to use this information, look for all we know, he's already given it away, but there's definitely more that's there."

Cohen posited that Trump would try to use the classified information to "ensure that he doesn't spend the rest of his natural life behind bars charged with treason."

He previously theorized that the former president intended to use the classified documents he kept at his Mar-a-Lago home as a "bargaining chip" in case he was ever at risk of being indicted or jailed.

"The second that they put him in handcuffs, he'll turn around and say: 'You don't seem to understand. I have the documentation showing, for example, where our nuclear launchpads are, or other information — sensitive national security information," he said.

Cohen suggested a situation in which Trump could threaten to have his supporters release the top-secret information to Russia or Iran. "My prediction, indictments are coming soon," Cohen said in his Monday TikTok.

Cohen has been known to criticize Trump and make bombastic comments about the former president.

This differs from speculation about possible monitizing intent, but Trump had some intent to his actions, and his general character and habits suggest speculation is not without cause. The worse would be some bad motive, better would be extreme hubris which was not monetized but nonetheless caused harm. Best would be despite all risk and worry, nothing strongly impacting national security happened.

Sometimes things are classified because they can be, not because they merit it. It can be where bad news can be hidden from public awareness.

In any event, he could have intended monetization as DWT speculated, or CYA "insurance" against being driven to jail by his past deeds, as Cohen suggested.

We do not know. Citing possibilities is not a firm accusation, nor suggestions of probable likelihoods. It is inference from circumstantial evidence, be it a strong inference, or a guess of "could have" or "might have intended had the seizure not been made." Careless, reckless, or ill-motivated are all things which might ultimately be explanations after FBI - DOJ and litigation happen and become history.