Trump's Waterloo?
by John D. O’Connor
The following is an article originally published on YourNews. Read it HERE.
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After the news broke that some White Sox players had deliberately thrown the 1919 World Series, a young boy approached the great White Sox player Shoeless Joe Jackson, imploring, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”
As conscientious citizens of conservative and moderate sensibilities digest the recent indictment of Donald Trump, they will share the disappointment of that young boy. A leader who many supported, and consistently defended against partisan broadsides, can now be defended only with difficulty. This prosecution is unlike other partisan attacks, because it appears that Trump has committed strongly provable crimes.
To be sure, the Mar-a-Lago search raid of August 8, 2022, had been infused with the strong odor of pretextual partisanship. The National Archives (NARA), after Trump delivered it fifteen boxes of documents in January 2022, wrote a referral letter to the Department of Justice alleging nothing more than that classified documents were contained in boxes alongside unclassified documents. Horrors! Clearly, NARA’s White House Liaison had been liaising all too closely with Trump’s enemies in the Biden Administration.
After the FBI opened a criminal investigation on March 30, 2022, and a criminal subpoena issued for classified documents, overkill seemed clear. Why not file a civil suit and deal professionally with the former President? The hostility and bias appeared clear. But the criminal nature of the inquiry of course warned Trump and his lawyers that any misstep could be criminal obstruction of justice.
It had always been the highly plausible narrative of the Trump camp that it had shown the investigators the storage area containing all of the document boxes, and at the government’s insistence, double padlocked the room. If so, the ineluctable conclusion had been that the subsequent raid was simply another Merrick Garland overreach, akin to the military-style, dawn raid at the home of the elderly, nonviolent Roger Stone.
But a blind squirrel sometimes gets an acorn, and Garland, through Special Counsel Jack Smith, just stumbled into an acorn storage nest. The pretextual nature of the criminal case’s opening, in hindsight, now no longer seems the start of a witch hunt. On May 11, 2022, the Grand Jury issued a subpoena to Trump for all documents with classification markings. His lawyers advised Trump that they needed to search the remaining documents for such marked papers, then certify to the government that they had performed a search and produced all responsive documents.
Up to this point the government certainly appeared to have been biased against Trump, and worthy of criticism. The case was being adversarially constructed, with part of the planned indictment simply being that Trump possessed important classified documents and did not care for them well, moving them heedlessly and storing them sloppily. Contrast that case with the actual use of key classified documents for years, including Presidential briefings, at the Penn-Biden Center, where Chinese representatives abounded. So, ho-hum, a partisan case was being jerry-built.
But Trump’s first reaction to the May 11 subpoena was not “open kimono,” as it should have been. It was to hide documents, and then lie about having hidden them. He spoke, ironically, in an admiring way, of the aide to Hillary Clinton who destroyed thirty thousand emails, suggesting that his team should act similarly. But unlike Clinton, he missed the lesson of her clever criminality: insulation.
On May 23, 2022, Trump agreed with his two attorneys that “Attorney 1” would return on June 2 to review the boxes for confidential documents to turn over to the FBI.
Between May 23 and June 2, 2022, Trump directed his aide and co-defendant Waldine Nauta to move sixty-four boxes from the storage area to be searched by his lawyer.
On June 2, Trump personally met with this attorney before the review, who thereafter was escorted to the storage room by Nauta. Both Trump and Nauta knew, and had so arranged, that the lawyer would not be given access to all boxes, with only thirty boxes having been carried back to the storage area.
Trump Attorney 1, apparently Evan Corcoran, who performed the search, and Attorney 3, who had provided the unwittingly false certification that all subpoenaed documents had been produced, met with the Department of Justice and FBI personnel, and handed over what they thought were the full complement of requested material.
On August 8, 2022, a search pursuant to warrant, conducted like a military raid, was performed, sparking widespread outrage. The search found 102 classified documents which had not previously been turned over.
To an outside observer, the raid seemed gratuitous. But hindsight now informs that the surveillance video footage, subpoenaed by the Grand Jury, had shown the movements of the sixty-four boxes between May 23 and June 2.
The clearly proven unavailability of materials, the emails between Trump and Nauta arranging their absence, and the testimony of his lawyers, combined to prove beyond doubt that the ex-President is apparently guilty as charged of the six obstruction and lying charges.
The upshot is that – there is no other way to say it – the former leader of the free world engaged in clear criminality. No crime this blatant was committed by the over forty government officials convicted in the Watergate scandal.
Parenthetically, it is still possible that the Special Counsel could charge two crimes in the anti-Trump venue of D.C., from which Trump originally removed his papers to Florida. These potential charges are weak, given that ex-Presidents can possess their documents for some period of time before providing them to NARA. But with a D.C. jury panel, a conviction would be highly likely.
Even though there will be a defensive reaction from Trump’s supporters, many of them will eventual peel away as more is published, while the crucial tranche of Independents and suburban women voters will not be enthusiastic about this tableau. One principle which applies is that voters should not allow biased government and a partisan media to disqualify a candidate. But the opposing principle holds that if a candidate deserves shame and obloquy, that candidate should not be blindly supported. Because we are a nation of laws, it should not matter in this case that others, such as Hillary Clinton, avoided conviction, as troubling as that is.
Trump supporters will now face a stark choice: stick with him, nominate him, and lose with him, while ensuring his humiliation. Or, alternatively, support a sensible candidate who can get elected and reform a politically corrupt system of justice, hopefully sparing the country the shame of an imprisoned ex-President.
As the great Ronald Reagan often noted, this is a time for choosing. We should all hope and pray, as our country faces serious crises – military, financial and political – that we will choose wisely.
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John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.