And there it is

The Justice Department on Thursday took the legally and politically momentous step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, accusing him of mishandling classified documents he kept upon leaving office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

[...]

The charges against him include willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

The Justice Department made no comment and did not immediately make the indictment public.

[...]

Trump confirmed on his social media platform that he had been indicted.

[...]

The former president added that he was scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Miami at 3 p.m. on Tuesday.

[...]

Mr. Trump remains under investigation by Mr. Smith’s office for his wide-ranging efforts to retain power after his election loss in 2020, and how those efforts led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. He is also being scrutinized for potential election interference by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga.

  NYT

UPDATE 06/09/2023:  LOL

Posting on Truth Social, Trump wrote:

For purposes of fighting the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time, now moving to the Florida Courts, I will be represented by Todd Blanche, Esq., and a firm to be named later. I want to thank Jim Trusty and John Rowley for their work, but they were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and “sick” group of people, the likes of which has not been seen before. We will be announcing additional lawyers in the coming days. When will Joe Biden be Indicted for his many crimes against our Nation? MAGA!

  Guardian

Donald Trump's lawyers Jim Trusty and John Rowley have delivered their resignations to the former president, the pair confirmed to NPR in an emailed statement.

"We will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation," they wrote. "It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administration's partisan weaponization of the American justice system."

  NPR

Personally, I think he already ruined it by representing Trump at all.

UPDATE  01:00 pm:

The charges:

UPDATE 01:19 pm:

The 49-page indictment gave the clearest picture yet of the files that Mr. Trump took with him when he left the White House. It said he had illegally kept documents concerning “United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”

[...]

In a particularly stinging portion of the indictment, Trump’s own words about the importance of protecting classified documents are recited. He said, for example, that “we can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified.” He also said, “In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

[...]

It is unusual for prosecutors to unseal an indictment before a defendant shows up in court for an initial appearance. But the decision to release the document in this case came as Mr. Trump and his allies had been aggressively attacking the investigation and, in the view of federal law enforcement officials, distorting elements of the case.

  NYT

Former President Donald J. Trump declared at a meeting in July 2021, six months after leaving the White House, that a document in front of him was “classified” and “highly confidential.”

[...]

The transcript demonstrates that Mr. Trump was not only aware he had sensitive material, but had it with him at his club at Bedminster, N.J., where the meeting took place, and that he knew he no longer had the power to declassify material.

[...]

At the time, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Mr. Trump had appointed, had been a subject of multiple media portraits describing him as pressing back against an erratic president in the final months of the presidency.

Mr. Trump went on a tear about General Milley.

“Isn’t it amazing, I have a big pile of papers,” Mr. Trump said at one point. Papers could be heard rustling, and then Mr. Trump began appearing to point to a specific document, saying, “Look, this was him.” At another point he said, “This was the Defense Department and him.”

[...]

He described something in front of him as “like, highly confidential,” and maintained it was really General Milley who wanted to attack Iran (in fact, General Milley cautioned against such a move).

[...]

Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly asserted that, while still in office, he had declassified all the material he took with him from the White House (though the charges may not rely on whether anything was classified). But his assertion appeared to be undercut by the recording.

“As president, I could have declassified them, now I can’t,” Mr. Trump was recorded saying, according to the person familiar with its contents. He then reiterated something was “classified” as he and one of the women in the room talked over each other, according to the person familiar with its contents.

“Isn’t that interesting? It’s so cool,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “You probably almost didn’t believe me, but now you believe me.”

  NYT

The Indictment

The end is nigh - Part 2

The Department of Justice is preparing to ask a Washington, DC grand jury to indict former president Donald Trump for violating the Espionage Act and for obstruction of justice as soon as Thursday.

[...]

US criminal code known as Section 793 [...] prohibits “gathering, transmitting or losing” any “information respecting the national defence”.

The use of Section 793, which does not make reference to classified information, is understood to be a strategic decision by prosecutors that has been made to short-circuit Mr Trump’s ability to claim that he used his authority as president to declassify documents he removed from the White House and kept.[I]t states that anyone who “lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document ...relating to the national defence,” and “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it” can be punished by as many as 10 years in prison.

It is understood that prosecutors intend to ask grand jurors to vote on the indictment on Thursday, but that vote could be delayed as much as a week until the next meeting of the grand jury to allow for a complete presentation of evidence, or to allow investigators to gather more evidence for presentation if necessary.

[...]

Even if grand jurors vote to return an indictment against the ex-president this week, it is likely that those charges would remain sealed until both the Washington and Florida grand juries complete their work.

Another source familiar with the matter has said Mr Trump’s team was recently informed that he is a “target” of the Justice Department probe.

[...]

[Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows has already given evidence before the grand jury and is said to be cooperating with the investigations into his former boss. It is understood that the former North Carolina congressman testified as part of a deal for which he has already received limited immunity in exchange for his testimony.

[...]

It is not yet known whether the testimony or the charges in question relate to the documents probe, or a separate investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Both investigations are being overseen by a Department of Justice special prosecutor, Jack Smith. According to ABC News, Mr Meadows has given evidence in both the documents matter and the January 6 investigation.

  UK Independent

This contradicts some earlier reporting (kind of) from the Washington Post, which reported that a "significant portion" of charges will be voted on by a Grand Jury meeting in FLORIDA, and no one has a straight answer about the two different Grand Juries. MY SPECULATION is that maybe the Florida grand jury is about charging Nauta and his pool buddy who accidentally flooded the room where surveillance footage was stored. But Budowich also testified today in Florida, and he has the same lawyer as Nauta and Kash Patel who is paid by the Save America PAC, so perhaps the FL grand jury is about the Jack Smith probe into the trump PACs.

But MEADOWS has agreed to plead guilty on several lesser charges in exchange for limited immunity, and he has most certainly already given Jack Smith all the information he needs.

  Allison Gill

Trump’s lawyers were sent a “target letter” days before they met on Monday with the special counsel Jack Smith leading the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the senior career official in the deputy attorney general’s office and argued that prosecutors should not indict the former president in the matter.

Trump has reportedly said he had not been personally informed by the justice department that he was a target when asked directly by a New York Times reporter, but demurred when asked whether his legal team had been told about the designation.

[...]

On Wednesday, former Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich testified before the Florida grand jury and was asked in part about a statement that Trump drafted in early 2022 that said he had given “everything” back after he returned 15 boxes of materials to the National Archives.

The statement was never issued, Budowich is understood to have confirmed. Several aides to Trump were against releasing the statement because they were not confident that the assertion was accurate.

  Guardian

UPDATE 06/08/2023:

Excuse number 58

Really, watch that clip.  Just amazingly insane.

I just saw a weather woman on TV saying there are 8 million people in the southwest whose lives are at risk due to flooding.  It reminded me of the sharpie edited weather map Trump showed to enlarge the region of a tornado.  

These people have absolutely no sense of shame.   And they have believed their own bullshit for so long, in the land of television, that they give no consideration to the fact that their bullshit costs lives in the real world.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

SOMEbody's going down

18 USC 793(e)

Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it;

DOJ’S JUNE MAR-A-LAGO TRIP HELPS PROVE 18 USC 793E

August 10, 2022/123 Comments/in Leak Investigations /by emptywheel

A receipt accompanying the search warrant, viewed by POLITICO on Friday, shows that Trump possessed documents including a handwritten note; documents marked with “TS/SCI,” which indicate one of the highest levels of government classification; and another item labeled “Info re: President of France.”

The warrant shows federal law enforcement was investigating Trump for removal or destruction of records, obstruction of an investigation, and violating the Espionage Act.

  MSN

The first receipt lists out 28 numbered items, including some that have sub-headers. Some of the items are actually named like item number 1 which says it was an “Executive Grant of Clemency re: Roger Jason Stone, Jr.” or 1A which says it is “Info re: President of France.”

Others like item number 2 are less specific. That item says it is a “Leatherbound box of documents.” Item 2A says it contained “Various Classified/TS/SCI documents.”

Item number 3 says it was a “potential presidential record,” and items numbers 5 and 6 both say they were a “binder of photos.”

Item number 7 says it was a “handwritten note,” and items 8, 9, and 10 were boxes labeled A-1, A-12, and A-15 respectively. Item 10A specifies that that item allegedly contained “Miscellaneous Secret Documents.”

The rest of the receipt document is similar and unspecific—explaining that several boxes, some allegedly containing various documents of various classifications—were among the rest of the items the FBI seized per this receipt.

  Breitbart

The areas allowed to be searched according to the warrant are much more extensive than originally reported.

Specifically, it says that agents could search the “45 Office,” and “all storage rooms, and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by” the former President of the United States [the document uses the abbreviation FPOTUS] “and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate.” This attachment does however said agents are not authorized to search areas “currently (i.e., at the time of the search) being occupied, rented, or used by third parties (such as Mar-a-Lago members) and not otherwise used or available to be used by FPOTUS and his staff, such as private guest suites.”

Fucking son of a bitch.  That was intentional.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:  From the warrant:

The coverup

Career officials at the Department of Homeland Security’s office of the inspector general added language about the missing [Secret Service] texts to a mandatory report to the Hill, along with sharp criticism of the Secret Service. But that draft language didn’t make it into the final document, which is public.

And the DHS inspector general’s office didn’t tell Congress about the deleted Secret Service text messages until July.

[...]

The language that didn’t make it into the final report to Congress included specific detail about resistance the watchdog office faced in obtaining Secret Service texts during “this reporting period,” meaning Oct. 1, 2021, through March 31. Over that time period, “Secret Service has resisted OIG’s oversight activities and continued to significantly delay OIG’s access to records, impeding the progress of OIG’s January 6, 2021 review,” the draft text opens.

The draft language then said that Secret Service interviewees refused to provide documents directly to the inspector general’s office, which amounted to “resistance to OIG’s oversight activities, for which justification has not been provided.”

[...]

Unlike the text Congress received, the draft language also said explicitly that the Secret Service’s resistance to oversight was ongoing.

“As outlined above, during this reporting period, the Secret Service has resisted OIG’s oversight activities and delayed the results of its review of the events of January 6, 2021,” it concluded.

[...]

In the end, the document that went to the Hill included just two sentences on the topic.

“During the previous reporting period, we included information about Secret Service’s significant delay of OIG’s access to Secret Service records, impeding the progress of our January 6, 2021 review,” reads the report Congress received. “We continue to discuss this issue with Secret Service.”

[...]

Congressional aides have obtained the same documents that the Project on Government Oversight obtained, according to two people familiar with the materials.

  Politico

Can't wait until the September January 6 Committee hearings. I'm hoping IT experts will have recovered the texts.

The New America: Silencing Whistleblowers, Controlling the Press

I used to be worried about the right wing. What used to be the left (the Democrat party) now looks vicious.

“I am a strong believer in the First Amendment and the need for journalists to pursue every lead and every angle,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Rutgers University student newspaper. “I think that when you hear stories about us cracking down on whistle-blowers or whatnot, we’re talking about a really small sample.

“Some of them are serious,” he continued, “where you had purposeful leaks of information that could harm or threaten operations or individuals who were in the field involved with really sensitive national security issues.”

  James Risen @ NYT

The evidence puts the lie to Obama's words.

Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

[...]

Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.

[...]

“Obama has laid all the groundwork Trump needs for an unprecedented crackdown on the press,” said Trevor Timm, executive director of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation.

[...]

The Justice Department, facing mounting criticism from media organizations, has issued new guidelines setting restrictions on when the government could subpoena reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources. But those guidelines include a loophole allowing the Justice Department to continue to aggressively pursue investigations into news reports on national security, which covers most leak investigations. In addition, the guidelines aren’t codified in law and can be changed by the next attorney general.

More significantly, the Obama administration won a ruling from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals [determining] that there was no such thing as a “reporter’s privilege” — the right of journalists not to testify about their confidential sources in criminal cases. The Fourth Circuit covers Virginia and Maryland, home to the C.I.A., the Pentagon and the National Security Agency, and thus has jurisdiction over most leak cases involving classified information.

[...]

Press freedom advocates already fear that under Senator Jeff Sessions, Mr. Trump’s choice to be attorney general, the Justice Department will pursue journalists and their sources at least as aggressively as Mr. Obama did.

So either real investigative reporting by US jouranlists is going to become a thing of the past, or reporting is going to get back some of its lost honor when reporters become heroic. I'm not making any bets.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

P.S.  Whistleblowers or whatnot?

My How Times Have Changed

A 1977 memorandum from CIA General Counsel Anthony Lapham stated that when it comes to prosecuting leaks of classified information to the press, “It is extremely doubtful that the provisions [of the Espionage Act] were intended to have application in such situations, and as a matter of historical fact, leaving aside the unsuccessful Ellsberg prosecution and possibly one or two other cases, they never have been so applied.”

Moreover, added Lapham, “Under current Justice Department procedures, unauthorized disclosures of national security information, in other than espionage situations, are almost never even investigated, let alone prosecuted.”

“It seems to us that the universe of classified information is quite simply too large, and encompasses such a great variety of material of so many different degrees of importance to the national security, as to make impractical the idea of extending criminal sanctions to the unauthorized disclosure of all such information,” he wrote.

  FAS

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Two Steps Back?

In a new interpretation of the Espionage Act, a federal judge made it easier for prosecutors in leak cases to meet their burden of proof, while reducing protections for accused leakers.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the prosecution in the pending case of former State Department contractor Stephen Kim need not show that the information he allegedly leaked could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially.

[...]

The prosecution must still show that the defendant “reasonably believed” that the information “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation” and that the defendant “willfully” communicated it to an unauthorized person. But it would no longer be necessary for prosecutors to demonstrate that the information itself could potentially damage national security or benefit an adversary.

  Secrecy News

So it doesn’t matter that the information could cause no harm. It’s all about intent. Is that what’s happening here? If so, I don’t see how, as the article begins that is an easier burden of proof. It would actually seem more difficult to me.

The Kim defense had argued that the requirement to show that the leaked information could cause at least potential damage was essential to a proper understanding of the Espionage Act statute. Without it, defense attorneys argued, the Espionage Act would become something like an Official Secrets Act, enabling the government to punish disclosure of anything that was designated classified, even if it was improperly classified.

That part is true, and not good, because now they can nab you for telling anything. I suppose even if it’s harder to prove you intended to harm the US, they can still make ruin your life by bringing charges for anything. But I think they could do that anyway, though.  This administration seems to be very fond of pulling out the Espionage Act to charge or just threaten people who embarrass it.

In a subsequent reply, the defense added that “The requirement that disclosure of the information be ‘potentially damaging’ is ‘implicit in the purpose of the statute and assures that the government cannot abuse the statute by penalizing citizens for discussing information the government has no compelling reason to keep confidential’ .”

As I said, it seems they do that anyway. Assurance or no. Perhaps this is due to one of the complaints that keeps coming up: things are overclassified which leads to people being charged with crimes they shouldn’t be charged with. Now, the judge is saying, you won’t be able to argue that any more.  The Espionage Act can cover anything we say it does. 

This ruling was apparently handed down in May and just now “unsealed.” It’s part of the messy case in which Fox News reporter James Rosen finds himself over political intelligence regarding North Korea leaked to him by someone in the NSC – currently several fingers are pointing and deflecting blame – which Rosen reported and which apparently had no potential national security harm at all.

Another victim in Obama's war on journalists and whistleblowers.

We Know Who You're Talking To

As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to” . . . .

  Miami Herald

We know.  We're collecting data, we're listening to your conversations.  We're reading your emails.

Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented. His Justice Department has conducted six prosecutions over leaks of classified information to reporters. Five involve the Espionage Act, a powerful law that had previously been used only four times since it was enacted in 1917 to prosecute spies.

Some spies. We’re no longer in the era of Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen or Kim Philby, infamous Cold War turncoats.

Instead, there’s Thomas Drake, a career official of the National Security Agency, who faced 35 years in prison for telling a Baltimore Sun reporter about what The New York Times called “a potential billion-dollar computer boondoggle.” At stake was bureaucratic embarrassment, not national security. (The case against Drake collapsed last summer.)

Then there’s Shamai Leibowitz, a translator for the FBI, who believed he had intercepted evidence of illegal influence-peddling by the Israeli embassy. When his boss wouldn’t act, he leaked transcripts to a blogger. He got 20 months.

Ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou was indicted in January for allegedly identifying a Guantánamo interrogator (who was not working undercover;) Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst, allegedly told a reporter for Fox News — wait for it — that the U.S. was worried North Korea might respond to new U.N. sanctions by testing another A-bomb; and Jeffrey Sterling, who allegedly disclosed a botched CIA operation in Iran that was described in a 2006 book by a Times reporter.

And there’s the biggest case, the court martial of Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of engineering the mammoth dumps of U.S. military and diplomatic data that Wikileaks, the online whistleblower network, turned over to leading newspapers in 2010 and 2011.

[...]

If the news media publish sensitive information, fully believing it ought to be made public, how can they stand by without protest when the government punishes the people who furnished it?

[It is] just as necessary for a government to shield its own actions from any transparency and scrutiny as it is to know everything which citizens are doing and saying. That’s the one-way mirror which all authoritarian regimes attempt to construct: those in power know everything about the conduct of those who are ruled, while those who are ruled know nothing about the conduct of those in power. That’s what keeps the power dynamic so imbalanced in one direction.

  Glenn Greenwald

Too Late

[As] Erik Loomis points out, the Espionage Act is an appalling artifact of an equally appalling age. In his exemplary new history of the FBI, Tim Weiner demonstrates how the Espionage Act was the reason why J. Edgar Hoover first came to power, which ought to be sin enough against democracy for any single law. Second, whistleblowers are not spies. Spies are spies. Somebody who tells a reporter that something's gone badly wrong at the Pentagon, or who tries to bring attention to crimes that may or may not be being committed in the name of everyone else in the country, is not a spy. To treat them as such, and to use an antiquated meat-ax like the Espionage Act to do it, is to take yourself and your administration down a long road that ends with Cubans hiding under desks in the Watergate office complex. I have argued that I knew when I voted for this guy the last time that I wasn't voting for FDR. However, I wasn't voting for Nixon, either. Knock this off, Mr. President. It leads nowhere but to a bad place.

  Charles Pierce

Already there, Charles.