The Watergate Pattern Again

I've noted before that once the Watergate scandal got well under way, there was a regular pattern whereby Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would make some assertion that the White House wasn't involved in any sort of coverup, only to have documents surface in subsequent days that showed the opposite was true. Ziegler then became famous for declaring his previous statements "inoperative".

We seem to be returning to the days of inoperative statements.

Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump's estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president's claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump's Florida home.

. . . The machinations are summarized in several memos and emails exchanged between the various agencies in spring 2022, months before the FBI took the added unprecedented step of raiding Trump's Florida compound with a court-issued search warrant.

The most complete summary was contained in a lengthy letter dated May 10 that acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall sent Trump's lawyers summarizing the White House's involvement.

. . . The memos provide the most definitive evidence to date of the current White House's effort to facilitate a criminal probe of the man Joe Biden beat in the 2020 election and may face again as a challenger in 2024. That involvement included eliminating one of the legal defenses Trump might use to fight the FBI over access to his documents.

The official version of the White House's involvement in the raid remains press secretary Jean-Pierre's statement on August 9:

The White House was not briefed or given advance notice about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday.

“The president was not briefed, was not aware of it, no. No one at the White House was given a heads-up,” Jean-Pierre said.

This is pretty clearly weasel-worded, and it's disingenuous insofar as it omits any specific denial that the White House planned the action, irrespective of its specific date and time. The latest document reveal indicates that as of May, there had been intense planning, with close White House involvement, for the Justice Department and the FBI to seize the remaining disputed documents, although the pretextual reason was the National Archives request, not any security violation.

The focus of this effort was to reclaim a dozen or so boxes of Trump White House records and memorabilia, apparently hurriedly packed at random by housekeepers in the days leading up to January 20, 2021, and demanded by the National Archives. Indeed, as late as June 2022, after the May letter, Trump had been cooperating with the Archives.

Here's the puzzle. Trump did in fact deliver an earlier tranche of such documents to the Archives this past January. But the Archives claimed after the January delivery that the randomly packed boxes contained classified documents, of which little else has been said publicly. The Presidential Records Act, however, is not a criminal statute. so some criminal violation must be found to justify a search warrant and an FBI raid.

However, it doesn't appear that the existence of classified documents in the January tranche was sufficient grounds for any charge against Trump, even though the Justice Department presumably already had them. But as far as we can tell pending unsealing the affadavit for the warrant, those documents became grounds for the August raid to get additional documents -- although as has been pointed out many times, there seems to have been little urgency in the timing of this whole enterprise.

This leads in turn to the conclusion, hard to avoid, that the raid was never more than a fishing expedition to see what else Trump might have. But there you've got the problem that however many boxes of random household souvenirs, letters, photos, or paperwork there may have been or still remain at Mar-a-Lago, they were basically low-priority detritus left around by the departing Trumps and hastily gathered up by the White House housekeeping staff in the waning hours of the administration.

We must assume that by January 20, 2021, anything of real importance had already been gathered up and taken away by Trump's own retainers and his attorneys, if indeed it had ever been in the White House (if I were smart enough to be president, would I trust anyone there very far at all?). Consider also that Trump from the time of his 2016 election had been suspicious that the Trump Tower was not secure and had moved his transition activities to his Bedminister, NJ facility. Thus I question whether anything Biden would want to find among Trump documents has ever even been in an obvious place if it were that important. In other words, if it was any kind of smoking gun, good or bad for Trump, why would he ever even take it to the White House, where official records can be made of it and inadvertent eyes can see it? He had, and has, too many other options for his personal and business security.

At this point, we may also assume that the correspondence from the White House to Trump's attorneys cited here was provided to the media by Trump's attorneys -- and further, that letter is just a public document, nothing confidential about it. My guess is that whatever Trump has, if it isn't public, it's far better protected than cocktail napkins and letters from Kim in a bunch of storage boxes, and Trump will release it on a schedule that suits him. I'm still trying to see how there's any up side for Biden in all this.