Megathread, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith Indicted Trump on 3 more felony charges.
Megathread, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith Indicted Trump on 3 more felony charges.
Pretty sure if I shared a classified war plan I would get life in prison. Lock him up.
I’m so over it tbh, they never will
If he isn’t pardoned I think he will spend the rest of his life on house arrest or in prison. These charges are serious, there’s undeniable evidence, and there’s about to be multiple venues so he can’t rely on a judge helping him in every case. Without a pardon his best outcome is being in a mar a lago prison until he dies.
But he’s likely to get a pardon before then.
i am not saying the "both sides" shit
but the reason they won't prosecute him properly is because then they all will be prosecuted properly as well when they do crime which they are all doing
Not even sharing, if either of us had taken 1% of the documents Trump had taken and kept them in a publicly accessible area like Trump did, we'd be sitting in a prison cell awaiting trial. We wouldn't be able to travel the country telling people why it's "so unfair" that we were being prosecuted for taking classified documents.
Trump is right that he's being treated differently than other people. Where he's wrong is assuming "differently" means he's being treated harsher than everyone else is treated. Instead, he's being treated with the softest of kid gloves. He was given multiple chances to return the documents, chances that we likely wouldn't have gotten. Had he returned everyone, he likely wouldn't be facing charges in this case. Instead, he tried to keep the documents and impede the investigation. Now, he's facing consequences for his actions while screaming that consequences are unfair for one such as himself.
Be careful what you wish for.
Some other extreme right-wing nutjob was imprisoned after a failed 'coup' about 100 years ago.That gave him a whole load of martyr rhetoric to play off.
People need to be held accountable for their actions. Right now, politicians and those in powerful positions, such as CEOs of the biggest companies, are given way too much power and influence with a complete lack being held responsible when shit hits the fan. Worst case for most of them is that they but their way out of their problems. It’s pathetic and it shows how the system that was supposed to prevent this shit is broken.
At his age going to prison is very likely a lifetime sentence.
I think he's only charged with retention/obstruction. No one in recent times has gotten a prison sentence for retention just fines. If you leak or sell classified information that's a different story.
It's one big circus. However, we're the clowns cause we keep waiting for the main act to start.
You weren't the supreme commander of the US armed forces ...
Were being the operative word. He was not CiC when he retained or showed off the plan to go to war with Iran, and despite what he (and maybe you) thinks, he doesn't have the power to declassify with his mind.
“Vorpious de liporius octo”, the coverup is worse than the crime.
Let’s hope if the crime isn’t enough that his attempts to cover it up are what takes him down.
Republicans didn't learn a damn thing from Watergate.
Wrong!
They learned they'd never let one of their criminals face punishment ever again. As a result they created FOX News in order to always be able to control the narrative and always muddy the waters.
It has worked brilliantly for them so far. And the only cost has been a complete erosion in the trust of news, complete erosion in civil discourse complete erosion in bi partisanship.
They have taken a metal pipe to democracy's kneecaps just to make sure their criminals never have to pay any real consequences.
All of this btw is fully documented. I'm sad to say say, but some brilliant minds put a lot of work into establishing and creating fox news.. It's very sad.
It's kind of like today we have brilliant engineers spending their time fighting ad blockers and shoving ads down people's throats.
They learned they can get away with it.
Because, IIRC, Nixon didn't die in jail...
they absolutely learned from watergate. they got everything they wanted from trump. hell, with what they learned from watergate they got away with selling crack to fund right-wing death squads on behalf of coca cola.
I don't know if that fits. He was showing off war plans. That could have had dire consequences.
Totally fair, I’m not trying to downplay what he initially did, I just think focusing on the coverup aspect is, in some ways, more effective. They can convince their followers that what he did wasn’t actually wrong (even if it absolutely was) but it’s harder to explain trying to cover up something that “wasn’t wrong”.
I don't know that the coverup is "worse" ... but its often easier to charge and prove
What gets me is how lowbrow and petty all this is and yet so many people just act like it doesn’t exist. I mean, the universe served up the most obvious villain doing the worst job of criming that I’ve ever seen. I mean his antics are nearly indistinguishable from scooby doo, I’m expecting someone to have a mask pulled off, find out it’s trump who then somehow gets away with it all despite meddling from those kids.
I feel like the entire world has been pranking me specifically to see how long I can believe that my fellow humans are capable of believing this.
how long I can believe that my fellow humans are capable of believing this.
stop assuming they're stupid and start realizing that they see in his corruption a chance to do a little bit of corruption of their own, maybe some political violence, all the absolute worst urges in them. they see in him the real liberty they've been seeking: the freedom to harm others and enrich themselves. they claim to believe, but really they're just relying on the fact that you can't actually go into their brains and prove that they don't.
The WWE crowd took an interest in national politics. It was inevitable, and the results sadly predictable.
It'll take a generation for them to get bored with it again and go away, but for now were stuck with them.
(Don't look them in the eye, it just provokes them.)
I predict a significant number would get bored when Trump either dies or ends up in prison, and can't get his face in front of news cameras nearly so easily.
Yeah people have unrealistic expectations of villainy these days after hollywood set the bar so high with all their criminal mastermind tropes. I suppose it's a good thing that most criminals are really dumb because as you said, half the country barely cares. If he'd been even remotely smart about it..
I know right? Everyone keeps calling him a mob boss, but I'd say he's more the mob boss who's so fucking stupid, he doesn't know not to say the quiet part out loud.
The only occupation that could be worse would be a spy that's too stupid to know not to say the quiet part out loud, so let's be glad Trump wasn't charged with... Ooooooh....
I'll say the obligatory "Trump's a criminal and needs to be in prison," and I mean it, but mostly I just think it's cool that our page is big enough here to have a megathread.
Megathread
16 comments
Come on, redditors, join us already. This is sad.
NY Times text:
Federal prosecutors on Thursday added major accusations to an indictment charging former President Donald J. Trump with mishandling classified documents after he left office, presenting evidence that he told the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, that he wanted security camera footage there to be deleted.
The new accusations were revealed in a superseding indictment that named the property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, as a new defendant in the case. He is scheduled to be arraigned in Miami on Monday.
The original indictment filed last month in the Southern District of Florida accused Mr. Trump of violating the Espionage Act by illegally holding on to 31 classified documents containing national defense information after he left office. It also charged Mr. Trump and Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides, with a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to reclaim the classified material.
The revised indictment added three serious charges against Mr. Trump: attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence”; inducing someone else to do so; and a new count under the Espionage Act related to a classified national security document that he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
The updated indictment was released on the same day that Mr. Trump’s lawyers met in Washington with prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to discuss a so-called target letter that Mr. Trump received this month suggesting that he might soon face an indictment in a case related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It served as a powerful reminder that the documents investigation is ongoing, and could continue to yield additional evidence, new counts and even new defendants.
Prosecutors under Mr. Smith had been investigating Mr. De Oliveira for months, concerned, among other things, by his communications with an information technology expert at Mar-a-Lago, Yuscil Taveras, who oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property.
That footage was central to Mr. Smith’s investigation into whether Mr. Nauta, at Mr. Trump’s request, had moved boxes in and out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago to avoid complying with a federal subpoena for all classified documents in the former president’s possession. Many of those movements were caught on the surveillance camera footage.
The revised indictment said that in late June of last year, shortly after the government demanded the surveillance footage as part of its inquiry, Mr. Trump called Mr. De Oliveira and they spoke for 24 minutes.
Two days later, the indictment said, Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira “went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the storage room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”
A few days after that, Mr. De Oliveira went to see Mr. Taveras, who is identified in the indictment as Trump Employee 4, and took him to a small room known as an “audio closet.” There, the indictment said, the two men had a conversation that was meant to “remain between the two of them.”
It was then that Mr. De Oliveira told Mr. Taveras that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” the indictment said, referring to the computer server holding the security footage.
Mr. Taveras objected and said he did not know how to delete the server and did not think he had the right to do so, the indictment said. At that point, the indictment said, Mr. De Oliveira insisted again that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, asking, “What are we going to do?”
Two months later, after the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago with a search warrant and hauled away about 100 classified documents, people in Mr. Trump’s orbit appeared to be concerned about Mr. De Oliveira’s loyalties.
“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Mr. Nauta as saying to another Trump employee.
In response, the indictment said, that employee told Mr. Nauta that Mr. De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Mr. Trump.” After the conversation, Mr. Trump — who during his 2016 presidential campaign often assailed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for deleting material from her email server — called Mr. De Oliveira and said that he would get him a lawyer.
The revised indictment also charges Mr. De Oliveira with lying to federal investigators. It recounts an exchange in which he repeatedly denied seeing or knowing anything about boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago, even though, the indictment said, he had personally observed and helped move them when they arrived.
Mr. De Oliveira’s lawyer, John Irving, declined to comment.
A statement attributed only to the Trump campaign called the new accusations a “desperate and flailing attempt” by the Justice Department to undercut Mr. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination to take on President Biden next year.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta have both pleaded not guilty to the charges in the original indictment. Their case has been scheduled to go to trial in May.
The new charges lay out in detail efforts by Mr. Nauta to speak with Mr. De Oliveira about the security camera footage and to determine how long the footage was stored after the government sought to obtain it under a subpoena.
The indictment contains an additional charge related to a classified document — a battle plan related to attacking Iran — that Mr. Trump showed, during a meeting at his Bedminster golf club, to two people helping his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows write a book.
The updated indictment provides specific dates during which Mr. Trump was in possession of the document — from Jan. 20, 2021, the day he left office, through Jan. 17, 2022, the date Mr. Trump turned over 15 boxes of presidential material to the National Archives. The specificity of the dates indicates that prosecutors have the document in question and the indictment describes it as a “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country,” adding it was marked top secret.
The meeting at which Mr. Trump showed off the document was captured in an audio recording and Mr. Trump can be heard rustling paper and describing the document as “secret” and “sensitive.”
Still, he has tried to suggest that he never had a document in his hand and was simply blustering.
“There was no document,” Mr. Trump claimed to the Fox News host Bret Baier in a recent interview. “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to declassify.”
The original indictment filed by Mr. Smith and his team in June came about two months after local prosecutors in New York filed more than 30 felony charges against Mr. Trump in a case connected to a hush money payment made to a porn star in advance of the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump remains under investigation by Mr. Smith’s office over his wide-ranging efforts to retain power after his election loss in 2020, and how those efforts led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. He is also being scrutinized for possible election interference by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga.
Chris Cameron and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice. He joined The Times in 2017 after working for Politico, Newsday, Bloomberg News, The New York Daily News, The Birmingham Post-Herald and City Limits. More about Glenn Thrush
A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Alleges Push At Trump’s Club To Erase Footage. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Non-paywall from The Guardian.
Paywalled.
For me at least, there are a bunch of links. It's a little confusing as they aren't separated by new lines but if you look for the politico one (probably others too) it's free.
Its a distraction for whats going on with hunter. If you dont think so Ive got a bridge to sell you
Ew.