Having devoted a good bit of time to the legal ramifications of the latest indictments of Donald Trump, we’ll begin today with Tess Bridgeman and Briana Rosen of JustSecurity, and their focus on the national security ramifications of Trump’s alleged retention and dissemination of classified documents.
Beyond compromising U.S. information, the security breach is significant because of its potentially damaging impact on intelligence liaison relationships and information sharing with other countries. If the documents contained information from joint collection streams, for example, it is possible that the former president has compromised allied governments’ sources and methods. As an example, some of the documents were marked “FVEY,”(or “Five Eyes”), indicating that they were shared with U.S. intelligence partners in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
The indictment details at least two instances of “TRUMP’s Disclosures of Classified Information in Private Meetings,” in unsecure locations, in which he knowingly shared classified information with people who did not have security clearances. Did he knowingly or unknowingly share any of this information with individuals who could have been agents of a foreign power, or with others who did so in turn? It is not inconceivable that foreign intelligence agencies – who would go to great lengths to access information of exactly this sort – could have gained access either to the documents themselves (were the boxes in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom, for example, left there during events?), by initiating a relationship with Mar-a-Lago staff who had access to the documents, or others in Trump’s orbit to whom he showed or described the documents.
Since these scenarios are plausible, the Intelligence Community may now be in the unfortunate position of having to assume the compromise of some of this information and needing to mitigate the potential fallout, which could entail dropping crucial programs or sources. (Indeed, the Intelligence Community may have needed to do so as soon as it was discovered that some of these documents were missing, which could explain a willingness to now use them in trial if certain intelligence streams are no longer active.) It is also possible that the Intelligence Community has not yet discovered all the missing classified documents, which poses a risk that some intelligence streams could be compromised without U.S. government knowledge (and be used to conduct denial and deception campaigns, for example).
I didn’t see this mini-thread in Saturday’s APR comments (by BPARTR and exlrrp) until far later, but I had the same question upon rereading the indictment: The DOJ charged for 31 classified documents when there were over 100 classified documents found. Where are the other documents? Are those other documents too top secret to be brought up in court? Are any of them still missing? Will they be featured in possible indictments in other venues?
(I did enjoy reading Matt Tait’s piece at Lawfare speculating on the provenance of the documents cited in the indictment—although it may be a little too speculative.)
Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel noticed a prosecutor she didn’t expect to see working on the part of the federal case based in Florida.
According to NBC news, Jack Smith prosecutor David Harbach, not Jay Bratt, was at the Miami courthouse on Thursday as a grand jury indicted the former President.
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By all appearances, Smith had a corruption prosecutor present the Trump indictment to the jury, not DOJ’s head of counterintelligence Jay Bratt.
I didn’t even know Harbach was working this case! I thought he was working the January 6 case. I thought he was working on holding Trump accountable for defrauding a bunch of MAGA supporters, claiming they were paying for election integrity when instead it all went to paying staffers at his post-election office (including Walt Nauta).
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But Harbach’s apparent role in presenting the indictment is one of the things that made me look at two of my favorite passages differently. There’s this passage, which I call “Hillary’s Revenge.” It collects five of the instances in 2016 where Trump distinguished himself from Hillary Clinton by boasting of his purported concern for classified information.
Jay Weaver of the Miami Herald points out that the city of Miami has hosted criminal trials featuring star defendants before. While none of them had the star power of a former president, Miami should be ready for Trump’s Tuesday arraignment.
This is an unprecedented federal indictment of a former president of the United States, a man who — love him or hate him — once occupied the most powerful office in the world and remains a leading candidate to regain the Republican presidential nomination.
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“Miami has had huge criminal cases in the past,” said lawyer Jeffrey Sloman, who served as the top federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida during a 20-year career there. “All of this is being planned out, so there is no muss or fuss. This is not our first rodeo.”
But there is no escaping that this will go down as a historic rodeo, the first time a former president has ever been formally charged with a federal crime. In Trump’s case, there are multiple felony allegations: including sharing defense secrets with unauthorized persons and obstructing government efforts to retrieve the records from his Palm Beach estate. It’s this serious: The maximum penalties for the charges call for decades in prison.
Trump gave couple of speeches yesterday to GOP conventions in Georgia and North Carolina and, well ...
Nathaniel Rakich and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of FiveThrityEight speculate that that Trump may suffer a popularity hit with this latest indictment.
The legal threat of more criminal charges is obvious — but will they hurt Trump’s chances of winning back the presidency in 2024? The public’s reaction to Trump’s first indictment can give us a clue. First of all, this second indictment is unlikely to significantly dent his popularity among Republicans. After all, Trump’s standing in the GOP primary has only gotten stronger since the New York state indictment came down. On the day before that indictment, Trump led Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by 19 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average of the primary. Since then, though, his lead has steadily increased — all the way to 33 points on Friday.
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Trump’s bigger problem is probably with the general electorate. We’ve previously found that scandal-plagued incumbents in general elections between 1998 and 20161 performed an average of 9 points worse than they’d otherwise be expected to. Of course, voters are more dug into their partisan camps today than they were in the early 2000s, and Trump was already facing plenty of scandals when he won the presidency in 2016. But a May poll from WPA Intelligence found that an indictment in the classified-documents probe would shave a few points off Trump’s margin in a hypothetical general election against President Biden. WPA Intelligence’s initial query found Biden leading Trump nationally 47 percent to 40 percent. But when asked to suppose that Trump was indicted for mishandling classified documents, allegedly refusing to turn them over and misleading investigators as to their location, respondents said they would support Biden 50 percent to 39 percent.
Kyle Whitmire of AL.com registers his surprise at the Supreme Court ruling upholding Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Last October, the state’s top lawyers walked into the U.S. Supreme Court last October expecting home cookin’, and why not? The last time the state took a Voting Rights Act case there, the justices gutted much of the law.
This time the state had come for the rest of it.
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The game was rigged, the ending already set — or so many thought. I was one of them.
But two hours later, when that hearing had ended, something had changed.
From the courtroom, I walked down the white marble stairs to the media room behind the beat reporters from the national news outlets. One turned to her cohort.
“Did Alabama just lose?” she asked.
There was a pause. A few folks laughed.
Nah! They couldn’t, right? Right?
Meanwhile across the pond, Michael Savage and Toby Helm of The Guardian report that the Conservative Party appears to be on the brink of civil war again after the resignation of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson from his House of Commons constituency, and the additional resignations of two of Johnson’s staunchest allies.
There has been wild speculation in Westminster over Johnson’s next move, with some suggesting he could even attempt to run in the Mid Bedfordshire byelection caused by the resignation of Nadine Dorries, one of his staunchest backers. However, Tory sources dismissed the idea as a non-starter.
It comes as another close Johnson ally, Nigel Adams, triggered a third potentially damaging byelection by announcing on Saturday that he was stepping down with immediate effect. Sunak was already facing byelections in Johnson’s Uxbridge seat, which Labour are confident of winning, and Dorries’s constituency, which is being targeted by the Lib Dems.
Some senior figures in Sunak’s team believe that the activities of a rump of MPs who remain fiercely loyal to Johnson are designed to cause maximum disruption. “It’s a Thelma and Louise moment, deciding to drive off the cliff together,” said a minister.
Emily McGarvey of BBC News reports that a former Cabinet minister made an explicit threat of “civil war” within the Conservative Party if Johnson is blocked from representing another constituency.
Former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg has warned the Conservatives against any attempt to block Boris Johnson if he seeks to stand in another parliamentary constituency.
Mr Rees-Mogg told the Mail on Sunday that to do so could plunge the party "into civil war".
Mr Johnson resigned as the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip on Friday over the investigation into Partygate.
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A Conservative Party spokesman said all potential constituency candidates, former MPs or otherwise, went through the same process.
Meanwhile, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had "failed to end" what he called "the Tory chaos", and called for a snap election.
Finally today, Mathieu von Rohr of Der Spiegel says that in light of the destruction of Kakhovka Dam, it is imperative to arm Ukraine so that there can be a quick end to that country’s war with Russia.
The reservoir contained 18 trillion liters of water, and when the dam broke, a catastrophic flood inundated parts of southern Ukraine, including the city of Kherson. Tens of thousands of people are now without drinking water. A number of desperate people were left to stand on their roofs and wait for rescuers who never came. Toxins are poisoning the environment and farming will be severely limited for the foreseeable future because the water used for irrigation came from the reservoir.
It is the realization of the destructive fantasies that rulers in Moscow have been unleashing on Ukraine since the beginning of their vile invasion. Initially, the Russian warmongers wanted to destroy the Ukrainian identity. Now, they intend to demolish the entire country. They are firing on Ukrainian cities using drones and ballistic missiles and are intentionally killing civilians.
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The precise circumstances that led to the breach of the Kakhovka Dam still must be clarified. But no matter what the facts might turn out to be, there is absolutely no doubt as to who is ultimately responsible: Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is Putin who, with his criminal war, is leaving behind scorched, toxic and flooded earth.
Have the best possible day, everyone!