Who’s cooperating?
Because the DOJ has multiple confirmed criminal investigations into Donald Trump, it can be tricky to keep them straight. For instance, the recent grand jury testimony by Pat Cipollone and Marc Short very much appears to be part of the DOJ’s fake elector probe into Trump. The seizure of John Eastman’s phone began as a DOJ Inspector General probe, but has now reportedly been handed over to the fake elector probe. And so on.
Now the DOJ has carried out a search and seizure warrant at Mar-a-Lago, reportedly taking numerous boxes of documents with them, and even breaking open Donald Trump’s safe. The New York Times says this is in relation to the DOJ’s criminal probe into Trump’s theft of classified documents. The kicker is that of all the DOJ Trump probes, this was the one we’d heard the least about, and now it turns out to have been the furthest along of all of them.
But the DOJ pretty much confirmed the existence of its classified documents probe in early 2022, when Congress attempted to obtain evidence in the case, and the DOJ had to explain to Congress why it couldn’t have certain evidence. There was also mainstream media reporting months ago that the DOJ’s classified documents probe had reached the grand jury stage. So we know this probe has been around for awhile and has been advancing. We just don’t know much else about it.
Yet when you consider that the DOJ prosectors running the classified documents probe were able to get a judge to sign off on a search and seizure warrant, that means they pretty much had to already have enough evidence to prove Trump’s guilt. Given that this was a search and seizure warrant for the home of the former President of the United States, the legal bar might have been even higher. So how did the DOJ manage to build this case? More to the point, who’s been cooperating?
The National Archives already reportedly confirmed awhile ago which documents Trump stole. But that’s just a starting point. The DOJ would have needed a witness to fill in additional details, such as when and why Trump stole them, and where Trump hid them. Let’s put it another way: you can’t get a warrant to search someone’s safe, for instance, unless you have reason to suspect that something specific might be in that safe. And who in Trump’s orbit would even have that kind of information?
The fake elector plot required a large number of co-conspirators, and that always leads to details spilling out, and non-guilty people having knowledge of the plot that they’re more than happy to share once subpoenaed. But the classified document scandal was more a matter of Trump simply having the documents boxed up and sent to Mar-a-Lago. Who all would even have known about it?
It raises the question once again of whether or not Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows may have flipped. Meadows would have been in a better position than anyone to know precisely what Trump was doing with those classified documents. Trump was so inept, he probably wouldn’t have even known how to have such documents brought to him without Meadows knowing.
If Meadows has flipped on Trump, then he’s certainly given up Trump on every one of his crimes, including this one. But there’s only slight, circumstantial evidence to suggest that Meadows may have flipped, such as the DOJ’s decision not to charge him for contempt, along with the Fulton County DA’s similar decision to skip over Meadows while sending subpoenas or target letters to everyone else involved in that separate probe.
It’s also possible that the DOJ managed to track down the lower level White House employees who physically packed the documents into boxes, or even a Mar-a-Lago employee who witnessed the documents being put into a safe. You never know. And that’s sort of the point. The DOJ doesn’t want us to know who’s cooperating with this probe, because if the public doesn’t know, then Trump doesn’t know, which means Trump may keep running his mouth to someone who’s secretly cooperating against him. But it sure feels like someone must be cooperating against Trump in this document probe.
