Stormy Daniels tells the court she spanked a former President with a rolled up magazine that had his photo on the cover before insisting she can speak to dead people while the FBI admits to staging the legal equivalent of pornography with a sensational photo of altered classified documents.
While the media has been obsessed with the salacious and completely unnecessary testimony of former porn star Stormy Daniels in President Trump’s New York City misdemeanor that wasn’t charged magically transmuted into a felony trial, the unprecedented attempts to jail a former President for novel crimes are rapidly collapsing under their own rather rickety weight. Two weeks ago, I discussed how the Supreme Court is likely to send the January 6th related indictments back to the lower courts to separate public from private acts, which was always likely to be the case for anyone not suffering from the plague of Trump Derangement Syndrome given the nature of Presidential power and the completely novelty of the case in general. Last week, yet another of the Trump indictments was effectively derailed, when Judge Aileen Cannon postponed the classified documents trial indefinitely after the revelation that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team had altered critical evidence and the FBI had staged a photo of supposedly classified documents for public consumption. This should also have been obvious given the unprecedented nature of the case, the fact that the sitting President was also found to have stored classified information for decades, and the events leading up to the indictment including a never-before-seen FBI raid on a former President’s home, but needless to say, Democrats immediately cried foul and claimed the judge was making purely political decisions as an appointee of President Trump himself. Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, for example, claimed “Judges are responsible for managing their calendars and for seeing to it that issues are addressed timely, so it is hard for me not to reach the conclusion that this [judge] is deliberately slow-walking the case to put it into a position where, should [Trump] be elected, he can order that the investigation and prosecution be terminated.” Equally needless to say, we are never supposed to notice the political affiliation of the rabidly anti-Trump prosecutors, two of whom at the state level campaigned on getting the former President before they even got into office, and at least two of the three other judges. Their decisions are by definition made with the utmost objectivity while any that happen to tilt in Trump’s favor are political, but in this case, it’s worth considering the reality of what has occurred.
The issue that prompted the delay arose because President Trump’s lawyers have argued that neither the President himself, nor anyone on his team, removed the materials from the White House in the first place. Rather, they were packed up by the General Services Administration, sealed, and shipped to Mar-a-Lago without the former President’s knowledge or consent, meaning any confidential information was placed there randomly by someone who did not report to Trump and wasn’t working at his direction. This claim is supported by the National Archives itself. Long before the FBI got involved – in close collaboration with President Biden’s White House legal team, mind you – the Archives and former President Trump were communicating about how to address some forty total boxes of documents that were shipped to Mar-a-Lago. As part of these discussions, a set of boxes was sent to the Archives at their request and after the initial review, they concluded that the documents had been stored without any coherent system, including empty folders marked classified and potentially classified information mixed in with personal records, essentially the sort of thing one would expect for government workers charged with packing up a large amount of office space in a short amount of time. (These communications have been released, but as a testament to the political bias inherent in Google, they are impossible to find in a search and I am forced to summarize here.) Sill, even the Archives itself acknowledged transitions between administrations can be “very chaotic” and as late as May 2021, they noted it could take “several more months” to transfer the documents, which somehow translated into an FBI raid before the process could be completed. This doesn’t automatically imply that President Trump was entitled to retain these documents or that there was no risk of the exposure of classified information, but it is important to the case because there is a fundamental question of intent underlying the government’s charges. In other words, it is one thing for a President to leave office knowing they have classified information and planning to use it for some purpose. It is quite another to have someone else pack up your records, ship them to you without your knowledge, and then assert your right to retain them or refuse to bend to the will of some bureaucrat because they are in your possession.
Therefore, the contents of the unmolested boxes, in the order and condition they were found, is potentially exculpatory evidence. If President Trump can show that he had no role in removing the documents and was merely asserting his right to keep them after they were delivered, the idea that he knowingly and intentionally removed and mishandled classified information falls apart or is at least greatly reduced. Special Counsel Smith’s team is undoubtedly aware of this. Previously, they told Judge Cannon that the precise sequence of documents was preserved, but last week, they were forced to admit that wasn’t the truth. “Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants’ review of the boxes,” they wrote in an updated filing before the trial was postponed before getting to the point. “There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” In a footnote, suggesting this fact was of minor importance, they conceded, “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.” A far less polite way to phrase this: They tampered with the evidence and lied about it, but more astute observers were aware that was the case from the very beginning, after the FBI released sensationalized photos from Mar-a-Lago that showed carefully arranged sets of classified documents, complete with cover sheets announcing to the world they were in fact classified or as though President Trump was about to post them on eBay for sale to the highest bidder. Even at the time, this was a rather bizarre move for a highly sensitive case involving a former President in what was always going to be a politically charged situation, especially when we saw no similar photos from investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information or even President Biden’s own challenges on the subject. The media, necessarily, was keen to pretend this was entirely normal. “[The] question of whether Trump had classified material with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort has captured the public’s attention. The photo published by the government appears to answer that question quite affirmatively,” The Washington Post’s resident “fact checker” Philip Bump wrote on August 31, 2022 while studiously managing to avoid the obvious. The New York Times went a step further, bizarrely insisting this was standard practice. “[It] is standard practice for the F.B.I. to take evidentiary pictures of materials recovered in a search to ensure that items are properly cataloged and accounted for. Files or documents are not tossed around randomly, even though they might appear that way; they are usually splayed out so they can be separately identified by their markings,” explained Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldmanon August 31, 2022.
The only problem is: The cover sheets announcing they were classified were put there by the FBI itself and were not present in the actual boxes. Previously, Jay Bratt, a prosecutor on Special Counsel Smith’s team claimed, “[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status,” but this wasn’t the whole truth, far from it. Mr. Bratt has since amended his statement to the court to reveal that the “colored cover sheets” were, in fact, added by the FBI. “[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose.” It was these modified – dare I say sensationalized? – versions of the documents that were used for the infamous photo, making them essentially political and legal pornography. Legal experts who are not Trump-deranged, noted the obvious. “Prosecutors and investigators should never tamper with or alter evidence in their possession, including the order of documents in a box because one never knows what may become relevant or crucial to a court or jury later in a case,” Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said. Tim Parlatore, who had worked for Trump in the past, said this kind of sensational, negligent, and politically charged behavior has been standard practice in this case and an “admission [that was] stunning on multiple levels.” It “reinforces the incompetence” of prosecutors “in conducting basic criminal investigations and prosecutions that I observed when I was on the team…But at a deeper level, the loss of specific document locations is a destruction of exculpatory evidence,” he added. “I went through all of the boxes at NARA and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes had been untouched since leaving the White House…For prosecutors who are trying to prove that the defendants knowingly possessed these documents to then destroy the evidence that would undermine that claim is a very serious violation.” Judge Canon, apparently has had enough of these shenanigans, and while she acknowledged the case had potential national security implications which present “novel and difficult questions” to say the least, she concluded that the eight motions currently pending from President Trump still needed to be decided and as a result, the trial couldn’t be conducted anytime soon. “[F]inalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [classified evidence] issues…would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions,” she wrote in the five-page order.
Objectively speaking, it’s difficult to say what else she was supposed to do. The government has repeatedly misled the court about their actions, up to including both tampering with evidence and releasing highly prejudicial, staged photos. The case itself, as she noted, is far, far more complex than prosecutors would have you believe considering the President’s Constitutional authority over classified documents, the untested relationship between the Archives and a former President, namely who is the final authority on classifying records, and the obvious fact that no other President or high ranking government official has been treated this way by the Department of Justice.
Trump being Trump, of course, means that we need to ignore all this and simply convict him as soon as possible. In their view, sensationalization trumps, pardon the pun, justice. This brings us back to where we began with Stormy Daniels, a literal porn star rather than a figurative legal one. Last week, Judge Juan Merchan allowed her to testify in a trial that is supposedly about falsifying business records with the intent of covering up another crime. Though prosecutors have so far failed to identify what this crime might be – using only vague references to “election interference” that the President has never been charged with, much less convicted of – the Democrat-donating, obviously Trump-hating judge felt it was appropriate to allow Ms. Daniels, who is notoriously challenged with the truth, to share details about an alleged affair that has no relevance to the case whatsoever in service of “credibility.” Thus, the jury was treated to downright lurid descriptions of how she supposedly spanked the former President with a rolled up magazine complete with this picture on the cover. “I took it and turned him around and swatted him,” she said. “Where did you swat him?” prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked. “Right on the butt,” she replied in supposedly riveting testimony. Beforehand, Ms. Daniels claimed that the future President met her in his hotel room dressed like Hugh Hefner in “silk or satin” pajamas. Supposedly, she asked about Melania Trump, “He said, don’t worry about that, we don’t even sleep in the same room.” Finally, she described how the sex was “brief” in the “missionary position.” Ms. Daniels also shared her final opinion on the matter, “I’d pretty much had enough with his arrogance” and then told Trump that “someone should spank you.” At some point, she claimed to be a medium who can speak to dead people and even the judge noted “there are some things that would’ve been better left unsaid” and the witness was “very difficult to control,” scolding prosecutors for testimony he allowed by claiming the degree of detail was “unnecessary.”
Two things come to mind: Why did he allow the testimony in the first place when whether or not the two had an affair has nothing to do with the case? And is there a better description of this whole sorry saga that it was better left unsaid and entirely unnecessary? Whatever the Trump-deranged may believe, these and other developments make it impossible not to believe the drama on both the federal and state level is for anything other than show, salacious in varied ways to the core, and the underlying motivations are entirely political, but I guess I should’ve told you something you don’t know and can’t see with your own eyes.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 