GUILTY
Any prosecutor or police interrogator will tell you that one of the best interrogation techniques, especially with stupid suspects, is to sit back and let them talk. Sooner or later they will run their mouths into a wall. Donald Trump is stupid in this way. He’s the kind of guy to cause a criminal defense lawyer to smack himself in the head.
On Sunday Trump mounted the stage at one of his Nuremberg-style rallies in Mesa, Arizona, and confessed to stealing classified documents from the government. “I had a small number of boxes in storage,” Trump told the audience. “There is no crime. They should give me immediately back everything they have taken from me because it’s mine.”
Actually there is a crime, and any chance Trump has of claiming he didn’t know about the boxes and what was in them is now gone. The plausible deniability defense of ignorance just got up and walked right out of the room on Sunday. “This is what we call a summation exhibit,” former FBI general counsel and Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said. “Proof from the defendant’s own mouth. And on video.”
What Trump told the crowd in plain English is he committed a crime (despite his claim to the contrary), he was aware he committed a crime, and he thought the government should give him his classified documents back. It’s like a bank robber admitting he knew he took money from the bank, said that’s not a crime and then said the FBI should return his money and leave him the hell alone. In actual fact, we know it’s a crime, which is why the Justice Department, the FBI, a federal judge and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals have all gotten involved in the issue.
“There is more than ample evidence to indict Trump for crimes listed in the FBI search warrant,” said former special counsel Ryan Goodman. “The question will come down to aggravating factors for [the] Garland DOJ to consider. Outrageous, open defiance of the law like this must surely rank high among those factors.”
In other words, Donald Trump’s chances of avoiding indictment and thereby avoiding prosecution just got vanishingly smaller. Cautious prosecutors sometimes like to have aggravating circumstances for icing on their cake. Trump’s open admission could be the icing they were waiting for. Now all they have to wait for is the end of the 2022 midterm elections to serve Trump with an indictment. Let it be so. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.