I hereby acknowledge the difficulty I am having in trying to wrap my noodle around the events of this week involving Donald J. Trump and the search that revealed what the world has learned he had squirreled away at his luxurious South Florida digs.
A major part of me wants the Justice Department to proceed with all deliberate speed in determining whether the ex-president committed crimes in taking highly sensitive documents out of the White House. My ol’ trick knee, which I acknowledge has been unreliable at times, is telling me that Attorney General Merrick Garland has the goods on The Donald.
His public statement, brief as it was, this week explaining what he approved and then his stout defense of the FBI and DOJ suggested to me that Garland is riled up.
I will offer an admittedly half-hearted salute to Trump for agreeing to allow the search warrant to be unsealed. He is going to play the victim card and his base is going to scarf it up. The rest of us should be prepared for what might be coming … and possibly sooner than we anticipate.
That would be a criminal indictment against a former president of the U.S.A. The charge? I don’t know. Violation of the Espionage Act is one possibility. So is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
What perhaps is the most glaring mystery to me is trying to determine what in the world Trump expected to do with what the FBI agents recovered. It’s been reported widely that Trump doesn’t read documents. He was infamously impatient with daily national security briefings and never looked — or so we have been told — at the reams of papers his national security staff delivered to him each day.
And did those documents fetched from Mar-a-Lago contain nuclear secrets? If so, then … holy crap!
We know already that some of the documents were of the highest security levels imaginable. And a president cannot just de-classify them because he gives the word.
I maintain my implicit faith in the attorney general’s integrity. What remains to be determined is whether he has the courage to withstand what will be a torrent of rage if he delivers on what I now believe he must … which is a criminal indictment against a former president of the United States.