The big revelation everyone missed yesterday about how aggressive the DOJ is being against Donald Trump
The DOJ dropped a few different metaphorical bombs on Donald Trump in its court filings yesterday. One of them was that Trump’s request for a special master may be too late to matter, because the DOJ has already finished sorting all of the evidence it seized from Trump’s home. This doesn’t merely mean that a flat footed Trump waited too long to finally make such a filing. It also meant that the DOJ has somehow already managed to sort the hundreds of documents stuffed into the seized boxes. Why is this newsworthy?
Keep in mind that those boxes contained some of the most highly classified top secret information our nation has. Most officials, even within the DOJ and FBI, wouldn’t be allowed to even so much as go through these boxes to determine which items have such high classifications. There are a very limited number of people with classification high enough to even crack open these boxes. Yet the Feds still managed to sort all the documents in these boxes, determine which of them are classified documents, which of them are non-classified but still allowable evidence, and which worthless pieces of paper should be returned to Trump.
This dovetails with last night’s reporting that the DOJ has spent several months lining up personnel to sort through these boxes. This means that the DOJ wasn’t negotiating Trump back in May, when it was asking nicely for the documents and such. It was buying itself time.
The unsealed affidavit makes clear that the DOJ has several secret cooperators in Trump’s orbit with detailed knowledge of the goings-on at Mar-a-Lago. It would have taken the DOJ a very long time to not only cultivate these inside sources, but to then coordinate with them on peeking around Trump’s home to find out where the various boxes of documents were being hidden. This also would have given the time to track down any documents that Trump may have sold or given away, while his co-conspirators around the world were still being lax under the belief that they’d gotten away with it all.
In the meantime the DOJ had to allow Trump to think that he’d gotten away with it all and that he’d get to just magically keep the remaining classified documents, so he wouldn’t panic and burn them in the middle of the night or something. In other words, the DOJ spent months figuring out what was in Trump’s home, and lining up the proper people to be in position to sort the documents, before pulling the trigger on the search warrant.
It may make more sense to think of this as having been a hostage situation. In such cases, the hostage taker has already lost the standoff the minute law enforcement knows he’s taken hostages. But law enforcement prioritizes the safety of the hostages, pretending to be friendly with the hostage taker, and trying to “bargain” for the gradual release of some of the hostages, even while casing out the joint and mapping out precisely how to eventually breach the building in a way that’s safest for the hostages. Once the hostage standoff is over, the hostage taker is going down anyway. So it’s less important to rush in and arrest the hostage taker, than it is to simply make sure that the hostage taker is brought to justice at the end of the standoff.
In that sense, the DOJ has indeed been particularly aggressive in taking down Donald Trump over the past several months. It just hasn’t been the kind of simplistic, strategy-free “aggression” that the dumbest of pundits endlessly call for without realizing that simplistic “aggression” usually results in failure. Instead the DOJ has been aggressively cutting off Trump’s ability to escape this or get off the hook, even while having spent months letting him mistakenly think that he’d “gotten away with it all.”
