It was about a week ago when Donald Trump sent a remarkable appeal to Capitol Hill, begging members of Congress to derail the investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified documents. It sounded outlandish — because it was.
In a deeply flawed 10-page letter, the former president’s legal team told lawmakers the Justice Department “should be ordered to stand down.” University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney and an MSNBC legal analyst, explained soon after how foolish the letter was, adding, “[This] looks more like a PR move on the eve of indictment.”
This came to mind reading The New York Times’ latest report on the ongoing criminal investigation.
Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified documents have obtained the confidential cooperation of a person who has worked for him at Mar-a-Lago, part of an intensifying effort to determine whether Mr. Trump ordered boxes containing sensitive material moved out of a storage room there as the government sought to recover it last year, multiple people familiar with the inquiry said.
According to the Times’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, prosecutors are especially interested in whether Trump attempted to hide relevant materials at his glorified country club in response to a Justice Department subpoena.
If prosecutors have an insider witness — who reportedly “provided investigators with a picture of the storage room where the material had been held” — it would obviously be an important development.
What’s more, the Times’ report comes about a month after a related article in The Washington Post that said federal investigators have gathered “new and significant evidence” that after the former president and his team received a federal subpoena, Trump “looked through the contents of some of the boxes of documents in his home, apparently out of a desire to keep certain things in his possession.”
The Post’s report, which also hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added, “Investigators now suspect, based on witness statements, security camera footage, and other documentary evidence, that boxes including classified material were moved from a Mar-a-Lago storage area after the subpoena was served, and that Trump personally examined at least some of those boxes.”
For his part, the former president published a series of angry messages about the Justice Department to his social media platform Friday morning, including one complaining about “the leaking coming out of the Special ‘Prosecutors’ Office,” followed by another item about special counsel Jack Smith “harassing and threatening” people “over the Document’s Hoax.”
The Republican went on to suggest he returned too many of the documents he took, arguing, “I have done everything right, except that I probably should not have returned documents until it was ALL settled.”
It culminated in a gem in which the former president wrote that “you can’t have Obstruction of Justice if there is NO CRIME or, even more so, if they MAKE UP A CRIME!”
This does not sound like someone especially confident about the direction of the investigation.
