Trump's lawyers

This position used to belong to people who were considered lawyers for the country.  Now they're lawyers for Trump.

UPDATE 04/03/2026:

Judge orders Navarro to turn over records

A federal judge has ordered former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro to turn over to the government hundreds of [work-related] emails that he sent or received [from a personal email account] during his nearly four years as a White House aide.

[...]

Navarro argued that the personal-account provision didn’t apply to messages he received, only to those he sent, but the judge dismissed that contention.

“All the emails in Dr. Navarro’s personal email account, whether created or received, are therefore subject to being assessed as potential Presidential records if they arose out of his employment in the administration,” she wrote.

[...]

The tone of Kollar-Kotelly’s 22-page opinion was brutal, but the lawsuit is far from Navarro’s biggest legal worry. He is facing a trial in the coming months on two criminal, misdemeanor charges of contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s role in fomenting doubt about the 2020 presidential election results.

[...]

[I]n his final weeks in the White House, [Navarro] shifted his focus toward efforts to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. He prepared a report based on discredited claims of fraud and worked with longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon and GOP lawmakers to strategize ways to object to the results on Jan. 6, 2021.

[...]

She gave the two sides 30 days to sort out a protocol to find other official records in Navarro’s personal account.

The Justice Department is set to make a key filing in Navarro’s criminal case next week, explaining why the department concluded that Navarro is not immune from a congressional subpoena even though he was serving as a top adviser to Trump in the White House in the weeks before and after Jan. 6, 2021.

  Politico

I might have thought that would have come first.

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

How to abscond with classified documents and not be arrested

Four days before the end of the Trump presidency, a White House aide peered into the Oval Office and was startled, if not exactly surprised, to see all of the president’s personal photos still arrayed behind the Resolute Desk as if nothing had changed — guaranteeing the final hours would be a frantic dash mirroring the prior four years.

[...]

Papers he had accumulated in his last several months in office had been dropped into boxes, roughly two dozen of them, and not sent to the National Archives. Aides had even retrieved letters from Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, and given them to Mr. Trump in the final weeks.

[...]

Although the White House Counsel’s Office had told Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, that the roughly two dozen boxes worth of material in the residence needed to be turned over to the archives, at least some of those boxes, including those with the Kim letters and some documents marked highly classified, were shipped to Florida. There they were stored at various points over the past 19 months in different locations inside Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s members-only club, home and office.

[...]

This month, prosecutors obtained a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago for remaining materials, including some related to sensitive national security matters. The investigation is active and expanding, according to recent court filings, as prosecutors look into potentially serious violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.

  NYT

And we don't know which instances of obstruction, beyond attempting to get back the documents Trump should not have in his possession, they're expecting to have evidence for.

Mr. Meadows assured aides that the harried packing up of the White House would follow requirements about the preservation of documents, and he said he would make efforts to ensure that the administration complied with the Presidential Records Act, according to people familiar with those conversations.

But as the clock ticked down, Mr. Trump focused on pushing through last-minute pardons and largely ignored the transition he had tried to forestall.

[...]

From his first hours in office, Mr. Trump had always taken a proprietary view of the presidency, describing government documents and other property — even his staff — as his own personal possessions.

[...]

[In reality, under] the Presidential Records Act, the law that strictly governs the handling of records generated in the Oval Office, every document belonged to taxpayers. Whether the materials were national security briefings, reams of unclassified documents automatically uploaded to a secure server in Pennsylvania or notes that Mr. Trump routinely ripped up or flushed down the toilet — all were government property to be assessed and, in most cases, transferred as part of the nation’s history to the National Archives.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s lawyers and aides were well versed in the records act, even if Mr. Trump routinely flouted it. Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s first White House counsel, instituted a protocol for the proper handling of materials and gave presentations on the law to staff members, former officials said. After the 2020 election, White House officials held conversations about the fact that someone needed to retrieve documents that Mr. Trump had accumulated in the residence over many months.

[...]

By the end of the administration, the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, were keenly aware that Mr. Trump’s handling of documents was a potential problem.

[...]

Mr. Meadows’s immediate predecessors in that role — President Barack Obama’s last chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and President George W. Bush’s final chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten — had created teams to scrub West Wing offices of anything that belonged to the archives and made the stewardship of government records a priority. It is unclear whether Mr. Meadows took the same measures, former aides said. But in the administration’s final weeks, the White House emailed all of its offices detailed instructions about returning documents and cleaning out their spaces.

[...]

Mr. Meadows also assured White House staff members that he would talk

[...]

[B]y early 2021, after Mr. Trump had left the White House, officials with the archives realized they were missing significant material.

They reached out to, among others, Scott Gast, who had been a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office under Mr. Trump, and Mr. Philbin. The two men, along with Mr. Meadows and four other Trump officials, had been appointed by Mr. Trump on his last full day in office to work with the National Archives.

[...]

The archivists were particularly insistent about getting back the missing correspondence from the North Korean leader and a letter left on the Resolute Desk for Mr. Trump by Mr. Obama, both of significant historical value.

Archives officials also asked Mr. Gast and Mr. Philbin about the roughly two dozen boxes that had been in the residence during the Trump administration’s final days. Mr. Philbin responded that he would work to get them in the hands of the archives and reached out to Mr. Meadows, who said he would help make it happen.

[...]

But archives officials did not get what they wanted until they traveled to Mar-a-Lago and retrieved 15 boxes of material in January 2022. Subsequently, archives officials told Mr. Trump’s team that they had identified social media records that had not been preserved, and that they had learned White House staff members had not preserved official business they had conducted on their personal electronic messaging accounts.

[...]

In the spring, both Mr. Philbin and Mr. Gast were questioned by the F.B.I. about the boxes; Mr. Cipollone was also interviewed at some point. A grand jury was formed.

[...]

In June, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers signed a statement asserting that all relevant documents with classified markings from the boxes that had been requested — by then they were stored in a basement area at Mar-a-Lago — had been returned. The Justice Department would later file a detailed affidavit to a federal judge in Florida, revealing that the department believed possible crimes had been committed, precipitating the search on Aug. 8 at the club.

[...]

None of [the] documents or any other materials pertaining to the Russia investigation were believed to be in the cache of documents recovered by the F.B.I. during the search of Mar-a-Lago.

Somebody's ass - or somebodies' asses - will soon be in a sling.

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

Right on cue

Well, I'll tell you what he DID know.  He knew what was not being returned when the National Archives asked for the records back.

Also...

He didn't pack them.  (He doesn't do any work himself.)  But he requested them.

He knew what he had.

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

UPDATE:

As for the claim he declassified the documents (he didn't)...

An afterthought:  Maybe this is why DOJ never seemed to be doing anything about the insurrection vis à vis Trump. They had something much bigger and more easily provable on him.

So will the DOJ take action against Trump?

If those 15 boxes of presidential material the National Archives retrieved from Mar-A-Lago prove to actually contain any classified material, I'm assuming DOJ will have to press charges, right?

BTW, I wonder how they found out those records were being held at Mar-A-Lago.  Somebody had to snitch.  Who was it?

“Throughout the course of the last year, NARA obtained the cooperation of Trump representatives to locate presidential records that had not been transferred to the National Archives at the end of the Trump administration. When a representative informed NARA in December 2021 that they had located some records, NARA arranged for them to be securely transported to Washington. NARA officials did not visit or ‘raid’ the Mar-a-Lago property,” the National Archives told the Palm Beach Daily News on Tuesday.

  Business & Politics

Even if DOJ did the right thing and pressed charges, I have no doubt it won't be against Trump, but some lackey, and Trump will claim not to have known anything about it.

UPDATE:

Political persecution!

Or maybe about effing time they got serious about Trump's presdiency. He's been criming his whole life and then squealing about being persecuted when someone actually takes it seriously.

A United States House of Representatives committee has launched an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s handling of White House records after 15 boxes of official documents were retrieved from his private Florida property.

The probe, announced by House oversight committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney on Thursday, comes after a string of reports detailing Trump’s mishandling of documents in apparent violation of the law.

[...]

A separate House panel is investigating Trump’s finances and business dealings.

[...]

In February, the Washington Post reported on Trump’s practice of shredding various documents, both sensitive and inconsequential, that extended throughout his four years in office.

The practice was so common during Trump’s presidency that staffers came up with a contingency plans – collecting the shredded papers and taping them back together – to try to prevent the president from breaking the law.

[...]

Meanwhile, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, in a preview of a new book, reported that staffers regularly found wads of printed paper clogging a toilet in the White House. The staffers believed Trump had flushed the papers.

  alJazeera

Those are the ones we needed to see.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported the National Archives found possibly classified information within the retrieved documents, and reached out to the Department of Justice to examine the matter.

It should disturb us all that the Trump family ever had access to classified information.

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

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Want to talk about government waste?

Remember the story about staff having to reassemble papers that Trump ripped up? Two of them talked with Politico.

Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.

But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor.

[...]

Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.

Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.

[...]

Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.

It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them

[...]

Lartey said the papers he received included newspaper clips on which Trump had scribbled notes, or circled words; invitations; and letters from constituents or lawmakers on the Hill, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“I had a letter from Schumer — he tore it up,” he said. “It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces.”

Lartey did not work alone. He said his entire department was dedicated to the task of taping paper back together in the opening months of the Trump administration.

[...]

“We had to endure this under the Trump administration,” [Reginald Young Jr., who worked as a senior records management analyst] said. “I’m looking at my director, and saying, ‘Are you guys serious?’ We’re making more than $60,000 a year, we need to be doing far more important things than this. It felt like the lowest form of work you can take on without having to empty the trash cans.”

[...]

One person familiar with how Trump operates in the Oval Office said he would rip up “anything that happened to be on his desk that he was done with.” Some aides advised him to stop, but the habit proved difficult to break.

  Politico

Like so much of how things are done in the Trump era, this is absolutely ridiculous.

Despite the president’s apparent disregard of the Presidential Records Act, sources said, aides around him have tried to take an overly inclusive approach to what would be considered a presidential record.

Anything that’s not purely personal — even just a note handed to an aide at a rally that was passed on to Trump — has been considered a record deemed worthy of being sent to records, where staffers could make sure the White House was being compliant with the law.

That team is now smaller, after many of the career officials were cleared out earlier this year.

Lartey, 54, and Young, 48, were career government officials who worked together in records management until this spring, when both were abruptly terminated from their jobs. Both are now unemployed and still full of questions about why they were stripped of their badges with no explanation and marched off of the White House grounds by Secret Service.

[...]

Both said they were forced to sign resignation letters without being given any explanation for why they were being dismissed.

[...]

Lartey said he was fired at the end of the work day on March 23, with no warning. His top-secret security clearance was revoked, he said. Later, five boxes of his personal belongings were mailed to his home.

“I was stunned,” he said. “I asked them, ‘Why can’t you all tell me something?’ I had gotten comfortable. I was going to retire. I would never have thought I would have gotten fired.” He signed a pre-written resignation letter that stated he was leaving to pursue other opportunities. But he is still unemployed.

Young, who was terminated April 19, said he fought back and had his official status changed from “resigned” to “terminated.”

“I was coerced to sign a resignation letter at that time,” he said. “Then they escorted me to the garage and took my parking placard.”

He described the firing as traumatic and frustratingly Kafkaesque. “The only excuse that I’ve ever gotten from them,” he said, “was that you serve at the pleasure of the president.”

Somebody perhaps heard them complaining.

"In the trash or on the floor."  He ripped up paper and threw it on the floor. Like dumping the open umbrella on the plane stairs. Let the peasants clean up his mess.

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

Are we sure we didn't drop into an alternate universe?

Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, [Solomon] Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.

It was a painstaking project that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”

Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.

But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor, according to people familiar with the practice. Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law.

  Politico

HE clearly was violating the law.

Staffers had the fragments of paper collected from the Oval Office as well as the private residence and send it over to records management across the street from the White House for Larkey and his colleagues to re-assemble.

“We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,” Lartey recalled in an interview. “You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor.” The restored papers would then be sent to the National Archives to be properly filed away.

This is pure insanity. Hysterically funny in a way, but also not funny at all. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Kushner - Another Violation?

In February, according to Politico, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer ordered staffers to hand over their phones for a spot check aimed at cracking down on leaks to reporters. During the phone check, Spicer reportedly warned staffers not to use encrypted texting apps. While the presence of confidential texting apps on a staffer’s phone presumably raised suspicions about exactly what he or she was trying to hide, and from whom, Spicer specifically warned that using Signal was a violation of the [Presidential Records] act.

[...]

But a phone number belonging to Kushner is registered in Signal (the app permits users to see which numbers in their contacts also use it).

[...]

A tweet from Elizabeth Spiers, who once worked for Kushner as editor-in-chief of the New York Observer, suggests Kushner downloaded the encrypted messaging app at the end of January just four days before his dad-in-law officially became president.

[...]

The White House did not respond to questions about whether Kushner uses the app, uses its disappearing messages feature, or how, if he’s using it, the White House is preserving those messages so as not to violate record retentions laws.

[...]

“Being ‘on Signal’ is not intended to be a secret,” Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Open Whisper Systems, which created Signal, wrote in an email. “Signal is used pretty extensively in government, has been approved for use in the US Senate, etc.”

[...]

But Congress doesn’t have the record retention requirements that federal agencies and the White House do. If Kushner is using Signal for government communication, whether because he’s wary of being hacked by Russia or because he’s scared of surveillance closer to home, he would need to preserve those records. Next time he’s testifying before Congress, it’s a question lawmakers should ask him.

  Splinter News

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

My new favorite name: Moxie Marlinspike

News From the Slop Bucket of US Governance

Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a report two days ago that detailed members of the Obama White House using personal email accounts to conduct official business with representatives of the pharmaceutical industry. The report also listed occasions where the same officials met outside of the White House, apparently at a Caribou Coffee, ensuring the meetings would not be recorded in official visitor logs. One official named in the report is Jim Messina, a former deputy chief of staff, now the Obama campaign manager.

[...]

"The Presidential Records Act was enacted to ensure that White House records are preserved for history and are owned by the American people," [California Democrat Rep. Henry] Waxman said. "Everyone who is covered by the law should follow it, regardless of which party controls the White House."

[...]

Waxman had demanded that Bush administration aides preserve emails when it was discovered during an investigation into the firing of U.S. attorneys that as many as 22 million Bush administration emails may have been deleted.
  The Hill

Republicans this week made a target of President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, pointing to emails unearthed in an investigation of health care deals to cast him as, at best, a political horse trader, and at worst, having potentially broken the law.

[...]

Messina is now under fire for the deal he cut with the pharmaceutical industry, buying their support for ObamaCare with expensive concessions, and doing so in the great tradition of private Washington bargains.

"I will roll [P]elosi to get the 4 billion,” Messina from his personal email account — the White House has claimed he also forwarded such emails to his official account — in March 2010. “As you may have heard I am literally rolling over the house.”

[...]

“This behavior is classic Obama White House: adopting high-minded reforms with pretty words and flamboyant symbolic gestures, then doing everything possible in secret to preserve and even worsen the abuses Obama claims to oppose,” Guardian columnist and longtime liberal critic Glenn Greenwald told BuzzFeed. “Two of candidate Obama's most prominent vows were general transparency and a specific refusal to draft legislation through secret meetings with industry lobbyists. On his most consequential bill, his White House directly and deliberately violated both of those.”
  Buzzfeed

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