Donald Trump’s espionage indictment is a whole lot more sinister than that

| 11:09 pm EDT June 7, 2023
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We’re about to hear the narrative that Donald Trump could have avoided prison if he’d just returned the documents when asked, and that he stubbornly did this to himself for no reason. And that’s true when it comes to the obstruction of justice charges. But the reason Trump is also getting charged with espionage is that his intent was much more sinister than mere stubbornness.

For instance, one of the key pieces of evidence in this case is a recording of Trump discussing an Iran-related classified document with Mark Meadows’ ghostwriters. This means Trump was willfully disseminating classified information, to people he knew weren’t authorized to hear about it, long before the DOJ got involved.

It sounds like these ghostwriters turned out to be harmless. But the reason Trump committed espionage by discussing the classified intel with them is that for all he knew, these ghostwriters could have turned around and sold that intel to Saudi Arabia. Trump knew he was exposing classified state secrets, and he didn’t care about the implications. That’s not stubbornness. It’s espionage.

We still don’t know what else Jack Smith has uncovered. We don’t know if he’s found evidence that Trump gave or sold any classified information to any foreign entities. We’ll see which way that goes when the indictment happens. But even just based on what’s already come out publicly, this was far more sinister than merely refusing to return documents or lying about their locations. Trump was willfully disseminating classified state secrets even before the Feds started demanding the return of the documents.

Donald Trump committed espionage against the United States. This wasn’t about boxes, it was about espionage. That’s the story. Let’s not allow the prevailing narrative to be any watered down variation of it.