The dog in the title refers to Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of Silver Blaze, where the curious incident was that the dog did nothing in the night-time. Sometimes the absence of evidence is evidence all by itself.
Marcy Wheeler writing at Emptywheel has a couple of posts of interest. One refers to the rather interesting legal arguments where Trump’s lawyers are arguing they need to see the documents the FBI found at Mar-a-Lago. These would be the documents they swore were not there, after conducting a “diligent search” in which they claimed there were none to be found.
There’s something weird about the argument that Trump’s lawyers — each time with the participation of Evan Corcoran — are making about the search of Mar-a-Lago. What they claim they’re up to is all over the map, and has evolved (for example, their first filing focused on Executive Privilege, but in last week’s hearing, Judge Aileen Cannon had to remind Trump lawyer Jim Trusty that’s what he was supposed to be arguing).
But their true goal, it seems, is to learn enough about what was taken so they can attempt to claw back certain materials that would incriminate Trump for reasons other than the sheafs of highly classified information that were stored in an insecure storage closet. It’s a two step process: Learn what was taken, so they can then argue that its seizure was a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment under what’s called a Rule 41(g) motion.
Evan Corcoran’s background suggests he is exactly the kind of lawyer that would appeal to Trump. The argument from Trump’s lawyers that they need to see exactly what was taken (Classified and all) in order to determine if it includes anything that should not have been, to properly defend Trump, is a bit of legal chutzpah in light of this reported by Wheeler:
Which, as I said, is pretty nutty, because according to the government, Corcoran told Bratt (and three FBI agents) the following:
[C]ounsel for the former President represented that all the records that had come from the White House were stored in one location—a storage room at the Premises (hereinafter, the “Storage Room”), and the boxes of records in the Storage Room were “the remaining repository” of records from the White House. Counsel further represented that there were no other records stored in any private office space or other location at the Premises and that all available boxes were searched
And another of Trump’s lawyers, Christina Bobb, signed a declaration claiming the following:
Based upon the information that has been provided to me, I am authorized to certify, on behalf of the Office of Donald J. Trump, the following:
a. A diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida;
b. This search was conducted after receipt of the subpoena, in order to locate any and all documents that are responsive to the subpoena;
c. Any and all responsive documents accompany this certification; and
d. No copy, written notation, or reproduction of any kind was retained as to any responsive document.
...There is no way that Bobb’s claim that a diligent search was done and Corcoran’s claim that he knew all Presidential Records were stored in the storage room can be true and, at the same time, a team including Corcoran first needs to learn what’s in the boxes and where the boxes were stored before he can argue about the grave harm that has befallen Trump by seizing them...
emphasis added
Somebody is lying and continues to lie.
But wait — there’s more:
Wheeler has a related article in which she notes something curious about the documents that were removed from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI: THE FBI SEIZED NO BOXES WITH PRESS CLIPPINGS THAT POSTDATE NOVEMBER 2020.
One of the things that has developed in this story is the seemingly random way Trump was handling documents all along. There are empty folders with top security markings — where are the documents that were in them? There are other papers jumbled in with them, along with newspaper clippings.
The last days of Trump’s presidency are filled with accounts of how randomly things were mixed together — but it’s of a piece with the way Trump handled things all along.
According to advisers, confidants and former aides, Trump is a “pack rat” who tends to leave the actual packing to underlings. At the end of the day, they clear his desk of paperwork — notes, scribbles, newspaper clippings, printed-out-emails, the new tree alignment for a golf course, a new grill for Mar-a-Lago — and the contents are placed in a box on the floor.
When filled, the box is removed by an aide and stored elsewhere. When he travels, an aide sometimes brings boxes along.
It was no different when he was president: Trump would board Air Force One or his Marine One helicopter, and his body man or valets would be toting boxes packed with briefing papers he’d ripped from binders, random papers that someone might have handed him, press clippings, defense memoranda, daily intelligence briefings or other classified material, according to former White House aides.
“They cover the gamut of everything,” a former White House aide who witnessed the spectacle said, declining to comment on the record because of the federal investigation.
Another former White House aide said that Trump was never much concerned about record management.
“He’d have no awareness,” this person said. “When he was done with a piece of paper, he’d rip it up and throw it on the ground. That was his way of saying he’s done … [but] the narrative [that] he was ripping up documents like he was his own personal shredding machine is not accurate — he’d rip it in half, not usually into a thousand pieces.”
emphasis added
Which is why what Wheeler has noticed is… interesting.
But none of those boxes — not even the collection including 357 government documents seized from his office (see item 4) — includes a single clipping that post-dates November 2020.
There are no clippings from the final two months of his Presidency — the months he plotted a coup.
And so if we adhere to the Maggie Haberman theory of compulsive pack-rattery, the most innocent explanation for Trump’s theft of government documents, there may still a serious problem. Because if every box in which Trump stored government documents should also have press clippings he read at the same time as those government documents, it means there would be no government documents at Mar-a-Lago from the period when Trump was plotting a coup…
...And if the dates of the clippings in the boxes are any indication of the dates of the records in the boxes, then it suggests the FBI may still not have all the records Trump stole from the White House. Indeed, it suggests the FBI might still be missing some of the most important records, not just for the January 6 Committee’s work, but also for our understanding of key policy steps Trump took in that period, including developments in the Abraham Accords and possibly even Trump’s withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty (which happened close to the end of November 2020). This is the period, too, when Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller cut off briefings to the incoming Biden folks.
Again, there may be an innocent explanation for the fact that the FBI seized no press clippings from after November. But the absence of any clippings from after that date — not one! — is the most remarkable thing disclosed by the detailed inventory.
emphasis added
Unless there is a compelling explanation for the absence of any clippings from after November 2020, or the FBI simply failed to list such clippings (which seems improbable), there are some questions that follow:
- Did the FBI locate and retrieve everything that should have been seized?
- Did someone or several someones go through the boxes that would have contained clippings from that period and hide the boxes elsewhere? Had they already sequestered them upon leaving the White House?
- What other boxes might still be missing?
- Were documents from that period destroyed before or after Trump left the White House?
- Who might have done any of this? Who knows what happened, when did they know it — and how much was Trump involved?
Let’s hope the January 6 Committee, the FBI, and the Department of Justice are looking at those questions, and are determined to get some answers. If there is anything we should have learned about Trump by now, it always gets worse the deeper you look.
Monday, Sep 5, 2022 · 10:07:47 PM +00:00 · xaxnar
UPDATE: The judge handling the lawsuit by Trump’s lawyers has handed down a ruling that a “special master” must be appointed to review the documents the government retrieved, which will A) slow things way down, and B) establish a really terrible legal precedent.
Digby weighs in here, and links to a righteous rant about today’s ruling by Judge Aileen Cannon from Kurt Eichenwald on just how corruptly bonkers this all is.
Marcy Wheeler has a lot to say on this: JUDGE AILEEN CANNON THINKS 64 TAX AND MEDICAL RECORDS NO INVESTIGATOR HAS READ ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN 11,282 STOLEN GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS
I’ll have a lot to say about Judge Aileen Cannon’s outrageous order enjoining the government from conducting a criminal investigation into violations of the Espionage Act. I want to start with the way that she has chosen to risk Donald Trump’s attorney-client privilege in order to vindicate it.
Cannon didn’t just order a Special Master be imposed to review a subset of 520-pages of material set aside as potentially privileged (something that would be unexceptional, but something that would actually give Trump’s lawyers less involvement than the filter team was preparing to give his lawyers last week, when they wanted to hand these documents over directly to Trump’s lawyers).
Those amount to 64 sets of documents out of the 11282 seized on August 8 — less than 4.6% of the seized documents (and likely close to .5%).
She said that because the filter team worked better than mandated by the warrant, it was proof the filter team wasn’t working, and so a Special Master would have to go over everything again.
emphasis added
And Wheeler is just starting to warm up on this. Read The Whole Thing.
Bottom line: Cannon’s ruling could potentially derail the entire investigation.