Yesterday, DOJ's special prosecutor unveiled stunning felony charges against Donal Trump. So serious are the seven charges he is facing – including obstruction of justice and the willful retention of national defense secrets – that he could in theory receive a 100-year jail term.
Other politicians, including presidents Obama and Biden and former vice-president Mike Pence, were found to have had classified documents but didn't face prosecution because they gave them up as soon as they were found. The crucial difference is that Trump denied having documents stored in his resort of Mar-a-Largo in Florida.
And we're not talking a few papers or folders here and there-- Trump illegally hoarded over 11,000 documents, many of which were classified top secret, containing details of U.S. agents abroad. The material was moved around and stored in boxes in his bedroom, a bathroom/shower, a ballroom, and a storage area in the basement of his Florida resort. Among other places, Trump kept sensitive documents in a storage room, a bathroom with a shower at Mar-a-Lago, a ballroom stage that visitors could access, as well as in a business center at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Among the many disclosure, several stand out.
In handling his trove of sensitive documents, Trump repeatedly exposed classified material to people who had no authority to view it and who had not been vetted. In the two instances where Trump knowingly shared classified military documents with other people, none of the other people involved had security clearances or other government approval to view those documents.
In December 2021, Trump’s aide Walt Nauta found that several boxes of documents in a storage room had fallen, spilling materials onto the floor. One of them was marked as only for officials with the Five Eyes intelligence-gathering alliance: the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Nauta took photos of the spill (one of which showed classified information) and texted them to a colleague. “Oh no oh no,” the colleague texted back.
In July 2021, Trump held a meeting at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with some of his staff and writers working on an autobiography of his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. Trump agreed that the meeting could be recorded. During the taped conversation, Trump talked about military plans relayed to him by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Trump then acknowledged that the material he was talking about was not declassified, saying: “As president, I could have declassified it ... Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
Trump also sought to conceal the boxes of classified material, and encouraged keeping documents hidden. “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” Trump said, according to one of his attorneys. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” he asked, according to the same attorney. The same attorney also said Trump made a nonverbal suggestion that the attorney take a folder with him and pull out possibly damaging documents. “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out. And that was the motion he made. He didn’t say that,” the attorney recalled, according to the indictment.
Trump hoarded documents relating to a vast swath of national security issues, including America’s nuclear capabilities and data about U.S. and allied vulnerabilities and possible responses to foreign attacks. In addition to the CIA, Trump kept documents that came from the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The indictment also includes charges against Trump’s aide, Nauta, on five of those counts, plus a single count of making false statements and representations against Nauta alone.
Trump is up against a crack prosecution team led by doggedly determined special counsel Jack Smith, whose thoroughness of approach is reflected in the way he ensured that every chambermaid and cleaner at Mar-a-Lago was interviewed under oath so they would be in no position to change their story when the case came to the trial. Trump also suffered a devastating setback when his lawyers lost their right to plead attorney-client privilege because they provided false information about the classified material to the Justice Department. Their testimony will now form part of the prosecution.
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