Trump's "Never Stole Those Docs" Exhibits Are Raising A Lot Of Questions Answered By His "Never Stole Those Docs" Exhibits

And Judge Cannon has the answers. But they are terrible.

In the year since he got indicted for stealing national security documents and storing them in his pool shed, Donald Trump has howled daily about a “two-tiered justice system.” He insists that he’s being persecuted by President Biden, whose own document “crimes” make Trump’s look like small potatoes.

In reality, the career civil servants at the National Archives (NARA) bent over backward to accommodate an increasingly obstructionist ex-president who inexplicably refused to listen to his own lawyers and just give the documents back. And two motions to dismiss unsealed this week, along with evidence that Trump himself insisted be placed on the public docket, reveal that his claims of ill treatment are ridiculous. The documents also highlight Judge Cannon’s transparent bias — no other court would have allowed Trump and his lawyers to make such outrageously bad faith arguments and lob patently false claims of misconduct at the prosecution. And even worse, she’s going to lend the gravitas of her courtroom to let him air these scurrilous claims at public hearings in the lead up to the election.

President Hoarder

That story begins long before Trump’s flunkies loaded up that moving van with national security secrets and headed for the Sunshine State. In 2018, NARA General Counsel Gary Stern alerted Trump's aides that the president “kept certain documents out of the system and in boxes” at Mar-a-Lago, and that documents belonging to the people were “not getting to ORM [the Office of Records Management]” as required by law. The missing presidential records included cabinet meeting notes, “docs President held/showed at events,” staff secretary notes and documents transmitted directly to then-President Trump, as well as documents created for events such as Trump’s “Salute to America.” Trump’s own representatives freely admitted six years ago that Trump routinely stored some “two dozen boxes” of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump has portrayed the effort to retrieve these documents as some kind of bookkeepers witch hunt. But under 44 U.S.C. § 2203, the archivist has “an affirmative duty” to safeguard government records, and, at the end of a presidential term, she “shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President” and “make such records available to the public as rapidly and completely as possible.”

Before Trump’s unwilling exit from the White House, then-Archivist David Ferriero began coordinating with Trump’s representatives under the Presidential Records Act to collect the government documents Trump had been hoarding. The designees included five lawyers from the White House Office of Counsel along with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who ran point on communicating with NARA. Stern offered to “scan and return” documents to Trump, to restrict transfers to his eyes only, to do whatever was necessary to facilitate the process.

“Bottom line,” he told Meadows, those documents “need to go to NARA before the end of the administration.”

“NARA and what Army?” Meadows replied, in an eerily prescient attempt at humor.