Trump RAGES that the FBI has now become the Secret Police as they implement a Search Warrant for classified documents being held in his home.
They argue that nothing like this has ever happened to any previous President. Well, no, it hasn’t, but then no previous President has ever taken official documents home and stuck them in the basement. For the record, taking any official document which should be in the custody of the national archives is a violation of 18 USC 2071.
(a)
Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
(b)
Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.
So Trump taking any official document, any document at all, from the White House and placing it in his home — or trying to flush one down the toilet — would violate the law and result in up to three years in prison plus they would be permanently disqualified from holding any office in the United States.
And yet, Fox News thinks this is a misdemeanor?
Let's be honest here, before he was granted the Presidency by the Kremlin, Trump already had a long history of hiding and destroying documents even those that were under court order and subpoena.
Over the course of decades, Donald Trump's companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.
This behavior is of particular import given Trump's frequent condemnations of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, for having deleted more than 30,000 emails from a server she used during her time as secretary of state. While Clinton and her lawyers have said all of those emails were personal, Trump has suggested repeatedly on the campaign trail that they were government documents Clinton was trying to hide and that destroying them constituted a crime. The allegation—which the FBI concluded was not supported by any evidence—is a crowd-pleaser at Trump rallies, often greeted by supporters chanting, "Lock her up!"
Trump's use of deception and untruthful affidavits, as well as the hiding or improper destruction of documents, dates back to at least 1973, when the Republican nominee, his father and their real estate company battled the federal government over civil charges that they refused to rent apartments to African-Americans. The Trump strategy was simple: deny, impede and delay, while destroying documents the court had ordered them to hand over.
[...]
For months, the Trumps ignored the government's discovery demands, even though court procedure in a civil or criminal case requires each side to produce relevant documents in a timely manner. This allows for the plaintiffs or prosecutors to develop more evidence in support of their claims, as well as for the defense to gather proof to fight the case against them. When litigation is filed or even contemplated, scrupulous lawyers and corporations immediately impose document-retention programs or require that any shredding or disposing of records be halted. Courts have handed down severe sanctions or even criminal charges of obstruction of justice against executives and companies that destroyed records because they knew they were going to be sued.
Yet when the government filed its standard discovery requests, the Trumps reacted as though seeking that information was outrageous. They argued in court that prosecutors had no case and wanted to riffle through corporate files on a fishing expedition. Once again, this led to more delays, more replies, more hearings...and another specious argument thrown out of court.
Six months after the original filing, the case was nowhere because the Trumps had repeatedly ignored the deadlines to produce records and answers to questions, known as interrogatories. When a government attorney finally telephoned a Trump lawyer to find out why, he was told the Trumps had not even begun preparing their answers and had no plans to do so. The Trumps also postponed and blocked depositions, refused to provide a description of their records, as required, and would not turn over any documents.
This is who Trump has been for decades, this is how he behaves. He doesn't comply with the law, he flouts it. He ignores it, he thumbs his nose at it. This is why he doesn't use email or text messages himself, he doesn't want to leave a “paper trail." This is why he reflexively destroys and tears up documents — to cover his tracks. This is why many documents from his White House had to be taped back together after being ripped apart.
(CNN) Former President Donald Trump would routinely rip up documents, drafts and reading materials, and he took several boxes to Mar-a-Lago when he relocated to Florida after leaving the White House -- raising concerns about his preservation of presidential records as required by federal law.
Three former White House officials told CNN they saw Trump, on numerous occasions,
manually destroy papers he was no longer interested in or had finished reviewing -- a practice that made it difficult for White House staff secretaries to preserve presidential records. Those officials said the former President sorted through file boxes in a rather methodical way -- tearing up newspaper clippings or drafts of tweets that he had rejected and tossing them to the floor, or stacking papers he wished to hang on to in a disorderly stack atop his desk.
They said Trump, who was often trailed by aides lugging file boxes as he boarded Marine One for day trips or overseas visits, ignored pleas to end the destructive habit. "The Boxes," as they were colloquially known among senior staff, contained all the save-for-later items that Trump would spend long flights going through: articles that he wanted to scribble Sharpie messages on before mailing them off to close friends; gossipy stories about West Wing drama that he would hate-read as he sought to identify leakers; and, occasionally, important memos on any number of policy topics or budding crises.
"He would have something in his hands when he came down from the residence and would say, 'Put this in my boxes,'" former White House communications director Stephanie Grisham recalled. "For longer flights, we would have six or seven boxes. He went through them when he had downtime."
Following the FBI search warrant at Mar a Lago and practicing classic whataboutism Fox has been off to the races with questions about Sandy Berger and Hillary Clinton’s email server.
Sandy Berger took classified documents from the National Archives in order to forward them to the 9/11 Commission for their review. He did not have the authorization to do this and eventually pleaded guilty to violation of 18 USC 1924 and received 2 years probation, 100 hours of community service, a $50,000 fine and loss of his security clearance for 3 years.
(a)
Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing
classified information of the United States,
knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than five years, or both.
Berger’s punishment was the result of a plea deal under this violation. A judge doesn’t necessarily have to throw the book at someone, but this wasn’t treated as a misdemeaner, it was a felony.
On the issue of Hillary Clinton, she was in fact cleared of wrongdoing. It wasn’t against State Dept. rules to use your own email account. Colin Powell had used AOL. Both Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump used private Trump Co. accounts while working in the White House. The classified items in her email were sent to her by her staff — who were also the people who had the authority to determine if something was classified or not. They had the authority to temporarily declassify items as needed, based on Clinton’s authority to do the same thing.
What’s further, the idea of physically destroying old phones is actually probably a good idea to ensure data security and privacy. The request to delete the remaining emails after her attorneys had already scoured them for any references to the government and/or Benghazi and provided that information back to the State Dept started from a question from her lawyers. “Do you still need the rest of this?” The answer was “No”, so they directed the IT support to delete the email archives — which they did. All of this happened before — let me repeat BEFORE — the Benghazi hearings and the public discovery of her private server. The problem was that the IT Tech forgot to delete one last copy of the archive, and didn't remember to do it until later — after the subpoena had been issued. He had no knowledge of the subpoena, he had not been directed by anyone to delete anything after the subpoena, Hillary had nothing to do with any of it.
This is why she was cleared. And then after all that, the FBI Inspector General cleared everyone involved in case of any wrongdoing or bias — including Peter Strozk and Lisa Page — because both of them wanted to pursue Clinton even more aggressively than they ultimately did.
The issues with Hunter Biden’s laptop are just ridiculous. Hunter never worked for the U.S. Government. He never worked for his dad, either in the Senate, as VP or as President. Hunter Biden is a graduate of Yale Law School who was working with the David Boies law firm as Burisma’s advisor on the U.S. legal system when they asked him to join their board. That was the third board position he had held after being on the board for Amtrak and the investment firm Rosemont Seneca Advisors. There is no evidence that there is any government or classified information held on his laptop. There is no evidence of any crime — other than drug use and questionable taste — on the laptop, where it’s provenance can not be confirmed — Hunter's supposed signature on the invoice doesn't match — and that data copied from it's harddrive can’t be verified and has been repeatedly tampered with and is likely full of Russian disinformation.
Fox is attempting to play this like it’s just never happened to anyone else ever. “If this could happened to a former President, it could happen to you.”
Well, yeah. If you took classified documents home from your government job, this shit could happen to you too. Absolutely, it could.
I used to work in a classified environment for a defense contractor and one other person there decided to take home two classified documents then he called up the Russian embassy in San Francisco in order to sell them. The Russians hung up on him because they knew their phones were bugged. The FBI called him back, pretended to be the Russians and arranged a meeting. He showed up with the two documents and ultimately got two life sentences for violating 18 USC 798.
(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
At this time there is no indication that Trump violated this statute other than the time he gave codeword classified Israeli intelligence to Russian Ambassador Kislyak and Foreign Minister Lavrov in the White House.
President Trump revealed "highly classified information" to two top Russian officials during a controversial Oval Office meeting last week, according to a report from The Washington Post.
The Post, citing current and former U.S. officials, reported Monday evening that the information relayed by the president to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak "jeopardized a critical source of intelligence" on ISIS:
"The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump's decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump's meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.
" 'This is code-word information,' said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump 'revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.' "
Trump also reportedly boasted to the Russians about the intelligence he was receiving, telling the two men, "I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day":
So, I mean other than that, there’s no evidence he’s violated 18 USC 798 — but he’s apparently absolutely on the hook for the other two statutes. And regardless of what Fox News says about it — that’s how the FBI and the DOJ would function with just about anyone else.
To be perfectly honest, unless he gets prosecuted under 18 USC 2071 and is unable to run for office anymore — Trump WILL RUN again. He'll use this search warrant or and indictment as a badge of honor. It will take 7-8 months after a potential indictment to have a trial and that will put him right at the beginning of the Presidential Primary Season. If Trump isn't both indictment and convicted he will repeatedly play the victim card. Oh, poor me. The FBI -- which is just chock full of meany Democrats — along with the DOJ and the Federal Courts are all just being jack-booted thugs. As a result — I, Donald John Trump — should be RE-ELECTED, despite the fact I was never unelected, to be President to “Clean THIS All UP!”
To this I say, bring it. This numbnuts lost by 3 Million votes in 2016. He lost by 7 Million votes in 2020. He'll lose by 10 Million votes in 2024. He never deserved to win and this time he won't have the Kremlin posting all over Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in his corner. He's doomed. Go on fucker, RUN. Run Donald, RUN!
Wednesday, Aug 10, 2022 · 1:03:47 AM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Eric Trump proclaims no family has taken more “arrows in the back.”
Prosecutorial Misconduct. Weaponization of the Justice Department. Hunter Biden with his shady deals, and his laptop. OH. The. LAPTOP. Why does the political persecution only go one way in this country?
Boo fracking hoo….