Trump
wildly misses the point of notorious Mar-a-Lago picture
Responding to a brutal
image, Donald Trump has spent part of the week missing the point of the
scandal. The issue has nothing to do with who made a mess.
Sept.
2, 2022, 11:58 AM CDT
By Steve Benen
The Justice Department’s court filing in the Mar-a-Lago
case on Tuesday night was devastating. Officials explained in brutal
detail that it not only found highly classified materials at Donald Trump’s
glorified country club, it also argued that it gathered evidence “that efforts
were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” with government
records “likely concealed and removed” before the FBI’s search.
But it was a single photograph included in the court filing
that proved tough to forget. At issue was an FBI photo showing documents and
“classified cover sheets recovered from a container” in the former president’s
office. The image featured documents marked “secret,” “top
secret” and “SCI” — a designation for highly classified “sensitive
compartmented information.”
It wasn’t surprising that Trump would feel the need to
respond to the fact that the public could see the picture. What was surprising
was his actual response.
The day after the Justice Department filing, the
Republican, by way of his Twitter-like platform, wrote, “There seems to be confusion as to the
‘picture’ where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released
photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when
they broke into my home. Wrong! They took them out of cartons and spread them
around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them. They dropped
them, not me.”
Yesterday, as HuffPost noted, he went further down the same road.
As you might expect, Donald Trump is not happy
that the FBI photographed all those classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, but the
reason he’s angry seems a little bizarre ― even for him. No, he wasn’t angry he
might face charges related to failing to return the documents. What really
pissed him off ― he claims ― is that the FBI wanted to make him look “like a
slob.”
The former president spoke to a conservative outlet called
Real America’s Voice and emphasized that he’s “a very neat person,” who’s
bothered that FBI agents “took documents and they put them all over the floor.”
Trump added, “A lot of people think that when
you walk into my office, I have confidential documents or whatever it may be ―
all declassified ― but I have confidential documents spread out all over my
floor, like a slob, like I’m sitting there reading these documents all day long
or somebody else would be.”
For the record, he didn’t appear to be kidding.
First, the idea that the materials were “all declassified”
continues to be a claim so ridiculous that Trump’s own lawyers are afraid to
raise it in court.
Second, as The New York Times reported, the way in which the FBI agents laid
out the materials for the photograph was “in keeping with standard protocols for
how federal agents handle evidence they come across in a search.”
Third, Trump has apparently moved on from the “planted
evidence” talking point, choosing instead to seemingly confirm that these
materials really were in his possession. In the process, he appears to have now
contradicted — in writing and on the air — claims from his own lawyers about
having previously returned all of the classified materials he’d previously
taken.
Fourth, the clarification was wholly unnecessary: The
Justice Department’s court filing doesn’t claim that the materials were found
on the floor. Rather, it says the documents were “recovered from a container”
in Trump’s office.
And finally, it doesn’t matter how they ended up
on the floor. Trump has spent much of the week wildly missing the
point of the entire scandal.
The question has nothing to do with who made a mess. The
Espionage Act doesn’t include any provisions related to who may or may not look
“like a slob.”
Imagine the police execute a search warrant at a suspected
jewel thief’s place and officers find missing loot. Then imagine the thief
responds, “Everyone can rest assured that I didn’t leave the jewels on the
floor.”
That’s nice, I suppose, but it’s
not altogether relevant to the subject at hand.