And that’s just for starters
By
Try
as we might to ignore Donald Trump’s wrestling with the Justice Department over
apparently illegal removal and possession of classified documents at his
palatial Mar-a-Lago home, neither the former president nor the courts will let
us go more than a day or so without feeling new insults about it all.
By Dan Wasserman
At
this point, according to government emails and reporting by
journalists, we’ve seen the sheer volume of taboo material grow into
a substantial mound topping 1,000 classified documents, including those
specifically reported to be those from the CIA and other security agencies.
Whatever else, this was a substantial haul of documents that are not legally
allowed outside of protected government facilities.
We’ve
learned that Trump, his lawyers and aides at various levels either consistently
lied or demurred about returning requested – and subpoenaed – documents back to
the National Archives. Indeed, we even saw one federal judge whom Trump had
appointed lecture Trump’s lawyers on how to write, present and serve notice of
a legal challenge.
We’ve seen Trump’s challenges to FBI
search warrants, to both the government’s most polite and most intrusive
requests for recovery of documents, fail repeatedly and keep swapping excuses.
And we’ve seen The Former Guy seeking to take political advantage by
turning the entire affair and its various legal or victim-like tendrils into
distasteful fund-raising and partisanship.
Even as the Florida federal judge is to rule on the possible, if heavily redacted, release of details of a supporting Justice Department affidavit to obtain the search warrant executed by the FBI, we’ve seen partisanship turn an already tawdry event into an absolutely ugly mess.
As The New York Times reports,
Trump stripped of executive privilege on several fronts seems legally unmoored
and us resorting to political claims of victimhood at the hands of prosecutors.
Lost
in the Political Mist
Seemingly
lost in the Trump efforts to paint the government – his own government – as a
persecuting force is a fact that Trump has held onto stolen classified
documents. It’s an irony beyond easy dismissal since it was Hillary Clinton’s
mistaken laptop with maybe a dozen classified documents that had finally
propelled Trump’s narrow electoral win in 2016.
He
wanted her locked up then, but now sees all government documents as “mine” to
use as he sees fit. So much for law and order.
Amid
all the ballyhooing among Republican leadership about the FBI being overtly
political are the realities that Trump was holding hundreds of documents, that
he had gone through them personally, that he had repeatedly resisted turning
them over to the government.
Even
his new demand for a “special master” to review what seized documents were his
own, like his passport (which was returned immediately), is silly. The National
Archives is itself just such a “special master.” And the Justice Department on
its own had already set up a group of uninvolved department lawyers to do what
Trump had requested.
Right-leaning media have
jumped on a mention that a White House counsel had signed away any executive
privilege claims on behalf of the National Archives as proof that Joe Biden was
involved in approving the FBI “raid” at Mar-a-Lago despite Biden’s assertion
that he knew nothing of the search warrant execution beforehand.
The
emails and actions cited make the case against Trump stronger by underscoring
his intention to remove government documents to store at home for his personal
use.
Seeing
a ‘Banana Republic’
Trump
and his circle, then, have come to demean the effort to recover stolen
classified documents and refusal to return them at least three times even under
subpoena – necessitating the FBI, as the efforts worthy of a “banana republic.”
There were tweets to that effect from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former
House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example.
In
that light, it was interesting to happen upon a political science study
summarized in Politico that looked
at “banana republic” prosecutions against former leaders as compared with other
global democracies.
“It’s
true that few American presidents have found themselves on the wrong side of
the criminal justice system. . . but plenty of other countries have arrested,
indicted, or imprisoned their current or former leaders, and it’s not a mark
against their health as a democracy. Quite the contrary,” an academic study of
243 cases from 1972 through 2021 shows.
“The
evidence shows that free countries — those that have strong records of
protecting political rights and civil liberties — are just as likely to hold
their current and former leaders accountable as unfree countries. In fact, such
moves are slightly more likely to make countries freer than less free, as well
as enable free countries to keep their republic intact.”
John
A. Tures, professor of political science at LaGrange College in
Georgia, looked at Freedom House data to
see if the country was considered free, partly free, or not free at the time of
the arrest, indictment and imprisonment. Among developed countries, the study
looked at prosecutions of sitting or former leaders in Colombia, France,
Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico and Portugal. Just yesterday, a federal
prosecutor in Argentina said he is seeking a jail sentence for fraud involving
former president and current vice president Christina Fernandez Kirschner.
In
short, what we should be focused on here is whether there was a crime, not on
the alternative world of victimhood of a partisan former president.
Terry H. Schwadron retired
as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los
Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He
was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of
several Pulitzers in New York. As an editor, Terry created new approaches in
newsrooms, built technological tools and digital media. He pursued efforts to
recruit and train minority journalists and in scholarship programs. A resident
of Harlem, he volunteers in community storytelling, arts in education programs,
tutoring and is an active freelance trombone player.