What did Donald Trump think he was even doing?
With the way the Feds were hounding him over it, Donald Trump had to know they were going to end up taking the classified documents by force. So why not just give them back voluntarily? It would have allowed him to argue at his trial that it was a misunderstanding and he was innocent.
There are a few competing theories. One is that Trump mistakenly thought holding onto the documents gave him leverage, and that he could perhaps trade them back for non-prosecution on other fronts. This would be clueless of him, but he never has understood how negotiations work.
Another theory is that the contents of the documents incriminate him. That’s possible. But the National Archives seems to already know what these documents are. Perhaps his plan was to claim at trial that such documents never existed, and the Feds merely pretended he stole them.
This would play into what Trump’s lawyer is vaguely implying on TV, which is that the documents were somehow planted by the government to frame Trump. If Trump had returned the documents, he couldn’t have claimed they were planted on him, right?
Yet another theory is that the documents contain compromising information on other people in government, and he thought he could use it as blackmail. There’s also the theory that he was going to sell them overseas if he ran out of cash.
Those last two are extremely serious accusations and would require proof of intent. Whoever told the Feds about the location of the documents could be close enough to Trump to also testify about what he was or wasn’t planning to do with the documents.
But regardless of intent, Trump’s extended refusal to give the documents back, even after multiple relevant government agencies confirmed to him that he had no legal right to them, should be enough to prove him guilty on a base charge of stealing them – and obstruction.
We all presume the worst with Trump, and we’re very often proven right. But keep in mind that Trump doesn’t need to have been planning to sell nuclear documents to Kim Jong Un for this scandal to still put him in prison. It’s enough that he stole them, and refused to return them.
It’s also possible that Trump took the documents, and refused to return them, for incoherently pointless reasons, and there ends up being no real explanation for it. But that would still make him guilty.
It’s also worth noting that whoever is tending to Trump these days – his lawyers, his remaining political advisers – these folks were apparently unable or unwilling to convince him to handle this document scandal in a less dumb way. So expect more dumb self-defeating moves by Trump.
