An interesting week. It rained, then it rained some more, and one afternoon I saw a shadow and was confused because I had to remember how shadows work. The refrigerator died after 20 years of uneventful service. I was going to replace it with something a little more deluxe until I priced it out. The replacement fridge was pricey, but somehow, in the 40 years since my house was built, “standard” appliances are no longer standard. Upgrading the fridge required a kitchen remodel that isn’t going to happen. So the replacement is a new version of exactly what I have now. Except that it works.
It was kind of alarming to clean out the old one. There was stuff in the back of the freezer that defied identification. Tupperware full of desiccated something. And completely by surprise, there was an envelope full of top secret documents. Apparently they can turn up most anywhere, like mushrooms.
On Tuesday, the former president appeared in a federal court to plead not guilty to 37 felony charges. Trump’s court appearance was as perfunctory as it is unusual. This is the first federal indictment of a former president.
It’s worth reading the indictment, which is available online. It’s not impenetrable lawyer-speak, and lays out a troubling pattern of conduct. Boxes and boxes of “stuff,” and that seems to be a technical term, were gathered up and sent to Trump’s private club where he lives. There was a photo of one of the spilled boxes that I think is a pretty good indication of what “stuff” means. There were newspaper clippings, miscellaneous correspondence, do-dads, photos, and jammed in the middle of it, a top secret report on nuclear weapons capabilities. It looks like a random sweep of a desk that hadn’t been sorted in all of his four years in office, all just pushed off the edge of the desk into a box and shipped off for reasons that remain a mystery.
The feds asked nicely to have their secret national security documents returned, and got nowhere. Then they subpoenaed them, and got a few. His lawyers certified that they had delivered everything, while there were still piles of boxes stashed in a creepily baroque bathroom, a disturbing mix of Versailles with a Walmart plastic shower curtain on a $5 adjustable rod. Finally, the FBI served a search warrant and cleaned the place out. We wouldn’t be here if he had turned things over when first asked.
Of course the indictment is the strongest assertion of the government’s claims, and some or possibly even most of it may be disproved or at least watered down in a future trial if we get to that. But he has pretty much admitted to having the classified materials, storing them in a semi-public place (one supporter in Congress pointed out that bathrooms have locking doors, which seems to fall short of the secure viewing rooms these things are generally kept in), and knowingly waving them around to people who have no business seeing them.
His best defense so far seems to be that, yes, he robbed the bank, but there are lots of other people out there who have robbed banks and are not being prosecuted. So it’s unfair to prosecute him for it just because he got caught. Yes, he absolutely put national security at risk leaving this stuff scattered all over the clubhouse, but Hunter Biden’s laptop. There’s no way to separate the political aspects of this. That’s our system of government. Somebody has to be in charge of the Justice Department, and it happens to be the current attorney general, who is appointed by the current president. Yeah, that’s awkward as can be. The special counsel system is a pretty good mechanism to try to isolate it from political interference, but clearly isn’t perfect. Unless the Canadians will take it over for us, it’s all we’ve got.
It could be years before this moves forward to trial. His defense team will challenge a lot of the fundamental process and evidence issues, and those will get appealed and dragged out for a long time. The impartiality of the judge is already being questioned, so there goes another three or four months at least. It was puzzling to see two of his defense lawyers quit at the last moment, claiming that they would be really interested in the most historical and consequential case they will ever see in their entire careers— except that the trial would be in Miami, and they don’t do Miami. So this is going to fester for a long time before there is any resolution. There’s nothing as boring as pre-trial motions.
To say that the whole thing is a big stinking mess is no understatement. It was completely avoidable if he had complied with the legitimate request from the National Archives a year ago. But we are where we are. I watched way too much of it on TV, where “experts” were spouting all kinds of useless speculation about stuff we won’t know for months. But the bottom line for me was a sense that this is both very unfortunate and absolutely necessary, and despite a lot of gear grinding, our system seems to be working.