This won’t save Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s allies and apologists will now try to paint his classified documents scandal as merely a result of the chaotic ineptitude of his term. They’ll say the Trump White House was such an incompetent circus, these boxes of classified documents surely ended up at Mar-a-Lago by accident, and perhaps Trump didn’t even know they’d been taken there.
But that argument became irrelevant when the DOJ told Trump that he illegally had top secret documents in his home, and he refused to give them all back, and then he claimed he’d given them all back when he hadn’t. That changed the game entirely.
If you’re the world’s most inept bank teller, and you get fired, and then later the bank informs you that you took home a bunch of checks when you were cleaning out your desk, and you give them right back, and you never tried to do anything with them, you might get off the hook.
But if you refuse to give the checks back, then give back some of them and claim it was all of them, and get caught on camera moving some of the checks to a new location, and so on, it no longer matters if you initially intended to steal them. Because now, by going to all these corrupt lengths to try to avoid giving them back, you have stolen them. And now you’re potentially on the legal hook for stealing them twice – in Trump’s case, espionage and obstruction.
