An inexplicable delay: what really happened here?
Who’s to blame for Donald Trump having a horde of classified documents including Top Secret and Top Secret compartmentalized (a narrower category than mere Top Secret) at Mar-a-Lago for 18 months?
Well Donald Trump obviously. But he had plenty of help, starting with the people who elected him President in the first place, and even more the large segment of them who took to worshiping him to the degree that he really began to believe in his own godlike status–not bound by the rules and laws by which all American citizens, including the top office-holder, are bound in principle. Next layer above voters consists of Republican politicians, primarily hypocrites who felt it was necessary to support Trump publicly for the sake of their political skins (and given the violence of Trump’s True Believers, perhaps their literal skins) even when they were well aware of his wrongdoing. The layer closest to Trump comprised members of his administration, most notably Bill Barr as Attorney General, who sank the Mueller investigation, and even launched a counter-investigation led by John Durham—a counter-investigation which basically in three years turned up nothing corrupt about the Mueller team. Bill Barr, first fired by Trump for dismissing Trump’s fraudulent charges of election fraud that cost him the 2020 election, and now horrified by the trove of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, has withdrawn his support of Trump . . . a bit late to curtail much of the enormous damage the ex-Prez has done to the country. (Done even if he hadn’t taken all those documents.)
We could go on naming enablers and Trump cult members on the Right, lawyers with preposterous claims about the 2020 election, and other lawyers who knew the facts but nevertheless created a legal cocoon around the ex-President, but you already know most of them, if not by specific names then the groups to which they belong.
Enough rightward finger-pointing. Let’s try some
more targeted finger pointing.
At this point, it’s evident that half the blame belongs to the parties named above.
The other half belongs to the Biden administration, in particular Attorney General Merrick Garland.
We can probably lay some of the blame on the National Archives as well, whose officials apparently did not attempt until the summer of 2021 to retrieve some of the documents that Trump hauled away in January.
Everyone who pays any attention to the news heard that Trump made off with multiple boxes of documents when he left office. It was common knowledge even among Fox News viewers—although Fox News viewers probably thought it was good that Trump was sticking a thumb in the eye of the “Deep State.”
Here’s a guy known to be a twice-impeached compulsive liar, a con-man, a tax cheat, an instrument of Russian policy, a deadbeat, a misogynist, who waltzes off with at least 15 boxes of documents—most of which we now know belonged not to him personally but to the United States government, and the citizens of said country (i.e., you, me, 330-million-plus others) —and no one thought to check it out for months, much less actually do anything about it.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2021 that the National Archives said, hold on a minute, weren’t there things in those 15 boxes we should have? Weren’t there things that were not actually personal possessions of Donald Trump? I mean, 15 boxes. (We know now it was more than 15.)
Is it warranted to say duh?
If it’s not duh, then we have to imagine negotiations going on behind the scenes between the Archives people and the Trump lawyers in early 2021 that have not to my knowledge been reported in the regular media. Let me know if you’ve heard of them.
But alarm bells should have gone off in the Justice Department long before the National Archives started to request Trump return the documents. They should have gone off in January 2021. In fact, it’s a good bet that some folks in the Justice Department did, if not ring an alarm, sound a little dinner bell. Which were ignored, because . . .
Merrick Garland’s priority was at the time not to make any Trump-heavy political waves for fear of bringing down the wrath of the Hard Right at a politically delicate time for Joe Biden, and Garland himself.
In Merrick Garland’s world in 2021 and half of 2022, political neutrality was the governing principle, even when anyone with an eye in their head understood the danger of Trump having made off with more than a dozen boxes of materials–not just political danger, but national security danger, and it turns out now national security danger of a magnitude not seen since U.S. citizens began trading nuclear secrets with the Soviets in the late 1940s and 1950s.
I’m coming down hard on Merrick Garland here, although I don’t doubt his patriotism, intelligence, and devotion to public service. I do doubt his political judgment, and, to say it politely, his political fortitude. If in the spring, or at the latest summer of 2021 the FBI could have conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago, much of the political fire coming in the fall of 2022 would have come a year ago, far from the election. Garland could have asked the National Archives to expedite a request in view of the danger posed by Trump’s trove of documents. Did he actually consider that Trump had honestly removed only personal documents? If so, his naivete is of a level disqualifying for the head of the country’s chief law enforcement agency. But he wasn’t naive. He was intimidated.
Joe Biden has bent over backwards to keep his executive powers restrained in regard to DOJ, at least publicly—avoiding the appearance of politicizing the Justice Department. You have to wonder what he was thinking in January 2021 when he heard about Trump taking all that material. If there were ever a case for discarding norms, this was it. Merrick Garland tacitly made it political by his inaction, cowed by the anticipated political firestorm. If he did this at President Biden’s cue, then they are both at fault.
Of course Biden had plenty of storm fronts to deal with throughout 2021, even though Qanon’s hoped-for “Storm”* never happened.
===========SCARY FOOTNOTE===============
* Speaking of The Storm, check out this review of The Storm Is Upon Us—an updated book by Mike Rothschild reviewed by Charles Kaiser in The Guardian. Mostly about the QAnon madness and its hold on a huge chunk of the electorate. The widening rabbit hole. (Sorry, rabbits, it’s just a metaphor.)
Kaiser ends his review with the following ominous words, with which I pretty much agree (the “unplugging” bit), but haven’t a clue what to do about it. Do you?
Rothschild ends by asking behavioral experts if there is anything the rest of us can do to help those who have gone far down this wretched rabbit hole. They say the only effective solution is a complete “unplugging” from the internet.
Every time I read another book like this one, I’m increasingly inclined to the idea that this could be the only road back to sanity for all of us.
Nice article, Mark, and I really like your new format!
Mark, couldn’t agree with you more. The passivity and naivete of Garland is a cause for deep concern. Each day, this sluggish course of justice is looking more and more like Mueller 2.0.
And now the Trump-named judge “agrees to name” a “special master” to comb through 11,000 documents to determine if any are privileged such that DOJ cannot use them for investigative purposes. “Agrees to name” is hardly the same as actually naming, so we may have to wait days more to have the “special master” go to work–that person to be most assuredly of the ilk who believe Donald Trump is due special deference despite the fact that he’s a crook, the judge knows he’s a crook, the special master will also know he’s a crook, indeed everyone except cretins who believe that Fox News is actually a news organization and not a propaganda machine, knows he’s a crook. We don’t know how many weeks it will be before the DOJ can recommence their investigation, assuming the Special Master even allows them to have enough of the documents to pursue an investigation. If the Republicans win the House, all DOJ activity will bog down under the weight of multiple Congressional investigations.
The judge’s decision is blatantly political, and influenced by intimidation on the part of Trumpists who have threatened her and probably also her family with bodily harm, as well as by some degree of loyalty on her part to the crook who got her named to the federal bench.
We are getting closer to a breakdown of the rule of law. Merrick Garland and Judge Aileen Cannon have thrown mud into the wheels of justice, and the cleanup will be long and hard if it even happens at all.