Posted on 08/25/2022 9:00:53 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Watch Dan Crenshaw do his level best a few days ago to defend Trump’s decision to withhold documents from the feds.
Dan Crenshaw’s appearance on CNN is off to a shaky start pic.twitter.com/xzbqiuyGFd
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 21, 2022
Trump has been cooperative, Crenshaw insists, so why didn’t the FBI just politely ask him to return the remaining documents he had?
But as we’re finding out, he actually hasn’t been cooperative. And he was asked to return the material in his possession — many times, including via a grand jury subpoena. Why didn’t he?
The latest scoop comes from WaPo, which obtained an email sent by the top lawyer at the National Archives to Trump’s team in *May 2021* requesting the return of two dozen boxes of documents. According to that email, Trump’s own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, had designated the material in the boxes as government property that properly belonged to the Archives in the final days of Trump’s presidency. Even his own lawyers concluded that he had no right to retain the papers, in other words. And the Archives had been nagging him for fully 15 months to please just hand them over before the FBI showed up at Mar-a-Lago.
Why didn’t he?
“It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the Residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be,” wrote Gary Stern, the agency’s chief counsel, in an email to Trump lawyers in May 2021, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post…
Stern cites at least two high-profile documents that the Archives knew at the time were missing — letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a letter from former president Barack Obama at the beginning of Trump’s presidency…
Throughout the fall of 2021, Stern continued to urge multiple Trump advisers to help the Archives get the records back, according to people familiar with the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump only decided to give some of the documents back after Stern told Trump officials that the Archives would soon have to notify Congress, and Stern told Trump advisers that he did not want to escalate and notify Congress, these people said.
Cipollone didn’t respond when WaPo asked him to confirm that he had determined that the records in the boxes should be sent to the Archives, not to Mar-a-Lago. But it would be very surprising if Stern had made that detail up or was misinformed about a fact that basic before sending a letter to a former president requesting the return of sensitive documents.
Follow the timeline here:
May 2021: The Archives, via Stern, asks for the documents back.
Fall 2021: The Archives, via Stern, keeps asking.
January 2022: The Archives, via Stern, threatens to involve Congress, spurring Trump to finally return some documents.
April 2022: After looking through the documents and discovering classified material, the Archives informs Trump that it’s now a national security matter and the FBI will need to get involved.
May 2022: The Archives, via acting director Debra Steidel Wall, tells Trump’s team that she’s tired of them stalling on their claim of executive privilege to try to bar the FBI from reviewing the documents and informs them that she’s rejecting their claim.
May 2022: The next day, Trump’s team receives a grand jury subpoena seeking the return of any other classified documents.
June 2022: Trump’s lawyers meet with the FBI to turn over more documents and sign a statement attesting that there’s no more classified material in Trump’s possession.
June 2022: Later that month, Trump’s team receives a new subpoena requesting surveillance video from Mar-a-Lago of the room where the documents are stored. The video allegedly shows “various people entering and leaving the room.”
August 8, 2022: Suspicious that classified material is still being stored on the premises despite 15 months of trying to get it back, the FBI conducts a search of Mar-a-Lago. According to the inventory of items provided to Trump afterward, they recover 11 sets of classified documents including some marked “top secret/SCI.”
They spent 15 months trying to do this the easy way. Trump wouldn’t let them. If, contra the determinations made by the Archives and Cipollone, he wanted to challenge the claim that the documents in his possession rightly belonged to him rather than the government, why didn’t he go to court early in this process? At the very least, why didn’t he challenge the first subpoena issued in May of this year?
Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy is watching this play out with growing unease. MAGA media has been harping on the fact that Steidel Wall, in her letter to Trump’s lawyers in May, acknowledged that the White House has been involved in this process. But the White House had no choice in that, McCarthy notes: Under federal law, once a former president asserts executive privilege over documents, the Archives *must* consult with the current president to see if he wants to honor the privilege claim of his predecessor. In this case, Biden deferred to Steidel Wall to make the decision, evidently not wanting to insert himself into the matter. It was Trump who dragged Biden into this by asserting privilege, says McCarthy.
He arrives at the key point:
For those of us who remain skeptical about whether the drastic measure of a search warrant was really necessary (especially given the FBI and DOJ’s evident lack of urgency in the months after Trump’s surrender of the 15 boxes in January 2022), these revelations require grappling with a hard question: Given that the former president was not responsibly securing the government’s most closely held intelligence, that he was trying to prevent the FBI from examining what he’d returned, that his lawyers were either misinformed about or lying about the classified information still retained at Mar-a-Lago, and that even the issuance of a grand-jury subpoena (with potential criminal penalties for noncompliance) had not succeeded in getting Trump to hand over the remaining classified information, what option short of a search warrant would have sufficed?
What was the DOJ supposed to do after 15 months of polite requests to get back “top secret/SCI” information that the former president wasn’t supposed to have and hadn’t properly secured?
I’ll leave you with this, in which a not-at-all nervous Trump manically posts about losing control of the documents on his new social-media platform. Remember as you read it that he wants you to believe he’s trying to turn down the heat of political passions surrounding the search.
We'll see how it plays out.
My question is why didn’t they take all of them. Telling them to put another lock on the location tells me that he had them with permission.
Salient words. 👍
Except…
1. The NARA packed the records in the first place
2. The classified documents were declassified
3. The Presidential records act allows him to keep them, unless they are needed for ongoing government business. The government had digital copies on their procession the entire time
4. The documents in question, more likely than not, were evidence of Biden, Obama, FBI, and DOJ illegal activities, and should have gone to a third party….Operation Crossfire hurricane.
5. The complied with all request for security already given.
In short, it’s been one media release of a lie after lie. The DOJ didn’t know. The White House didn’t know. It’s nuclear secrets. They didnt know what documents he had. They were top secret….yet it looks like crossfire hurricane material already declassified. The FBI used a general search. The FBI took irrelevant materials like passports, which have nothing to do with the story. The FBI took attorney client material-illegally.
In all this, if your going to do an FBI raid, you better have your search in order and clear it with SCOTUS before. You have to make sure you haven’t overstepped or it looks like a government cover-up of illegal activity. Which raiding and removing materials about crossfire hurricane by Joe Biden and the FBI would amount to. As yet, they went to a judge who had already recused himself…..not good. Finally, of the 30k of records Obama took, many marked top secret, none have been digitized or even checked by this same office.
The public already sees this for what it is, Biden Gestapo.
Even if all, a big if, this is true, this does is not a reason for 30 FBI agents with a General Warrant to raid his home and go thru Melanias clothes when they could knock in the door and ask for those 2 boxes. And, they never raided Hillary for servers, phones, Obama for 33,000 documents. Nice try.
No he doesn't. The National Archives has said that all Obama administration documents are in their custody.
If the documents were supposed to be turned over to the National Archives on January 20, 2021 then how could they have been leaked to the January 6 committee six months later?
The National Archives. AKA nameless bureaucrats.
Trump said, erroneously, that the documents were his property and he did not want to give them back. What he was planning to do with them, or perhaps already did do with them, we do not know.
Always enjoyed reading him, but the anti-Trump bias permeated more and more articles that made him a late day read and some days just skipped. Will be interesting to see where he ends up.
Had an extended family member think that he went to college with AP and later confirmed it (to my satisfaction for what that matters). Said he was a normal guy but could be a £]!#.
FWIW, I think he ends up on Substack. He has a large following and can really cash in if he goes that route.
Debra Steidel Wall
Acting Archivist of the United States as of May 2022
Raised in the Swamp, all DC schools, Georgetown U, American U, started as trainee at National Archives (NARA) in 1991.
Debra Steidel Wall was not happy with Trump!
https://youtube.com/shorts/XSXEqRpYatk?feature=share
Why does the Swamp hate Trump so much?
Because he saw how wasteful they are and planned to do something about it.
The Government Shutdown scared all these lazy teat-suckers that their cozy digs were at risk, so they banded together to Get Trump! Can anyone say Treason? Yes, there are faithful federal employees that got the goods on their former or current treasonous coworkers. That is developing.
To understand their mindset: Presidents are temporary, but federal employees are forever. They fancy themselves as the real rulers of government, able to slow things down with bureaucratic red tape or speed things up for Woke causes.
You can't fire them, there are laws protecting them.
Recently a Republican bill was introduced to make all fed workers "At-Will" and that means they can be fired or let go at anytime.
Are all fed workers to be scorned? No, of course not. Standards were at one time so high that some of the best minds were in government service. But not now. The standards were lowered. Who lowered them? Can you say Obama? It started before Obama but his circle accelerated the decline and seeded all agencies with lefties while Soros concentrated on States.
FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE UNITED STATES was the 8-year seeding of the federal workforce with leftist ideologues.
Debra is part of the Swamp that will do what she is told and will "accommodate" her Woke Masters like Carolyn Maloney.
Debra pulls in more than $200,000 a year and you better belkieve she thinks she's worth every penny. But Trump didn't think so.
https://www.federalpay.org/employees/nat-archives-and-records-administration/wall-debra-steidel
Are we jealous of Swamp lizards like Debra? Hell No! We are DISGUSTED because we can clearly see they are not worth it. Once upon a time a few decades back, Public Sector employment paid 50% to 75% of Private Sector. Now it's reversed and we ask "What the hell do we need these slugs for who have proliferated up and down the spectrum of American life? Why can't we reduce the size of this monstrosity?" And to add insult to injury, they act like they are our masters! WTH?
Donald Trump was a masterful businessman from the private sector and he clearly saw the waste in DC. All of Fedzilla could see he was a threat to their cozy good thing. They hated him and would do anything to see him gone.
In conspiring, abetting, plotting against Trump and by way of him, all of us, Debra and her cohort of slugs have made themselves the Enemy Within.
So now they will fight us and no army of FBI/IRS Agents will prevail against us. Sorry Debra, but We have no sympathy for your type feeding at the federal trough, you made their choices, you chose your side, you can suffer the consequences.
Lastly, there are government employees that stepped down or are stepping down who are faithfully testifying to the collusion against Trump.
https://newtube.app/user/Hostage/FokM5dV
In the years ahead, the nation should recognize this group, offer reinstatement with full backpay. All government employees are required to take an Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution. Those that think the Oath is no big thing, they are going to find out just how wrong they are.
He has a large following of people who like to insult him. Every article he posted on
Hotair was followed by majority negative feedback in the comment section..
I doubt he will have a comment section on Substance which will cut back on his number of followers.
Yeah! Never read the comments because of that.
I think his rationale will be people won’t pay $5-10 per month to hurl insults in the comments. Some will, but I think it weeds out most of that.
Except the Nat Archives only control the material the President gives them. They cannot legally demand material from the Pres. By going to court Trump is forcing the issue before SCOTUS where it will be decided in his favor. Unfortunately the intention of the Marxists will have been satisfied, to create an appearance of malfeasance by Trump. Their shade only extends to the exit of the cave where the bright light of MAGA drives it back into its hole.
Someone gave kudos to Andrew Tate for rising above the slanders to which he has been subjected for a few months.
Our beloved President Donald J. Trump has suffered far worse for far longer and has kept a magnificent sense of humor. Unscathed by the most malicious evil doers in our body politic, Trump remains, and grows, as a Man For All Seasons. He is to be greatly admired.
“2. The classified documents were declassified”
This should be 1
If this is actually the truth , which I am not sure of, than this entire matter is over. If he declassified them then we’re talking about nothing. This should be easy to ascertain but I’ve not seen much evidence from either side proving the narratives. The fact the FBI has leaked a bunch of still classified documents from Trumps collection is pretty telling imho.
The NARA "assumed physical custody" on paper but according to published accounts Barack Obama actually had the documents in his possession.
.
Which is to say it appears he believes he holds compelling evidence that will "clean out the swamp".
None of this is criminal. This is trumped up bullshit to attack the man. Pardon the pun.
There is no crime.
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