Post #6365 Commentary: Reflection on Trump's Growing Indictment Problem

 I really don't care to write about Donald Trump; I don't like to repeat myself. I have never liked him personally. Even in the 80's he came across as a self-promoting snake oil salesman, a real estate developer who was heavily vested in local political favors. Any MBA student taking marketing 101 will warn against tarnishing one's brand; Donald was diluting his surname brand on almost any consumer product or service you can think of, completely unrelated to his core empire, including nut not restricted to airlines, steak, liquor, education, water, clothing, etc. I think for me, the final straw was when he tried to use eminent domain abuse to steal an old woman's home so he could use her property for casino limo parking. This ultimately failed in court, but what kind of person tries to do something so evil?

I have to admit I found Trump's reality TV series Celebrity Apprentice entertaining. I never bought into the idea "Six Bankruptcies" Trump was some sort of genius businessman. I noticed even then Trump never took ownership/responsibility for his own mistakes. The lenders he stiffed in his bankruptcies he dismissed as "sharks".  I remember Trump flirted with the idea of running for the 2012 GOP nomination but eventually decided continuing his hit TV series was more important.

But one episode of Celebrity Apprentice stood out in particular. At the beginning Trump mentioned talk about him being a Presidential candidate and wanted to know their thoughts. Knowing their status on the show depended on telling Trump what he wanted ti hear, they quickly reassured Trump they thought it was a stroke of genius.

The fact is Trump has been flirting with the idea of running for POTUS for nearly 35 years. Originally, he seemed to use his 1987.8 Reagan-critical campaign as a marketing gimmick for selling his book The Art of the Deal.  He loved the publicity and the attention, but he really never fleshed out a political agenda. His first serious bid was a short-lived bid for Perot's Reform Party POTUS nomination in 2000; I believe at the time he was floating the idea of celebrity hostess Oprah Winfrey as a running mate. Trump called himself "very pro-choice" and ran on "fair trade" (which we free traders see as a variant of protectionism), eliminating the national debt, and universal healthcare. Trump has always incompetently focused on a failed understanding of the trade balance.

During the 2000's Trump embraced causes like the assault weapon ban. In 2004 he was quoted "Well, you’d be shocked if I said that in many cases I probably identify more as a Democrat,..It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans." Trump refused to reform senior entitlements during his Presidency.

According to the Washington Times, Ttump has changed affiliations at lreast 5 times:

• GOP, 1987
• Independence Party, 1999
• Democrat, 2001
• GOP. 2009
• unaffiliated, 2011
• GOP, 2012.

It has never made sense to me how Trump evaded the dreaded RINO label. (In fact, Trumpkins have used it to label "establishment Republicans".) Trump, in a deep blue state, has heavily contributed (directly or indirectly) to Dem politicians, including Hillary Clinton for multiple years, paised her as his senator on a telecast, invited her to his last wedding, and reportedly supported her and then Obama for POTUS in 2008.

I'm convinced that Trump saw the GOP as his easier path to a major party nomination. He couldn't get there with moderate Republican policies. I think he seized on the birther conspiracy and immigration as means to connect to the GOP right wing (even thought he had blamed Romney's "cruel self-deport" policy for his 2012 loss). I think he saw a way to spin his political inexperience as a plus vs. drawback. I think he saw a way to tap into middle-class anxiety over economic uncertainty over trade, like how the outsourcing argument had played against Romney. He saw "America First" as a means to rationalize his more autarchic trade and foreign policy.

I'm not going to rationalize the RussiaGate rubbish here but I thought Trump had opened the door by asking Russia for help in retrieving Clinton's missing emails and letting his son meet with Russians certainly contributed to suspicions of a quid pro quo.

I'm not going to review what I regard as Trump's failed term in office here. I'm not going to underestimate the Dems' unhappiness of their nominee winning a national plurality but losing the electoral college for the second time in 5 elections. But the problem was more of a case of it being a change election year, a deeply unpopular nominee, a bitterly contested, close primary and a split base, and a generally flawed general election strategy. It wasn't about third-party candidates or some genius Russian social media effort operating on a shoestring budget. So I never believed in the RussiaGate nonsense. I can understand Trump's defensiveness over a frivolous investigation, but I felt Trump's attempts to intervene in the case were counterproductive, improper given his intrinsic conflict of interest, and likely impeachable conduct. Trump's impulsive flawed judgment was revealed fatrly early in his tenure with his termination of James Comey for insufficient personal fidelity and a growing RussiaGate investigation. His subsequent misconduct during the Mueller investigation undermined Mueller's eventual exoneration in substantive allegations, flirted with impeachment.

The impeachments further fed Trump's persecution complex and his paranoid delusions of a Deep State. I've written more tweets and posts than I care to recall about Burisma, Biden and Shokin. It's very clear that Trump is using US military aid to extort Zelensky into a politically damaging investigation of top political rival, Biden, an incontrovertible abuse of diplomatic authority, even with Trump's own transcript of his 'perfect call'.[It's possible some GOP senators gave Trump a pass because the extortion failed.] On the J6 dereliction of duty impeachment trial, Trump lost the vote, but a super-majority was needed to convict.

I had been concerned about Trump with the approaching 2020 election, because he all but said the only election results that he would accept was his reelection. I knew he was particularly unhappy with COVID-era liberalized election laws meant to minimize health risks at the polls. The GOP generally has strong Election Day turnout. But let's be clear: Trump had experienced historically low approval rates all term long; he lost the mid-terms, especially the House. He was running in a sub-par pandemic economy; struggling economies hurt Carter and GHW Bush's reelection prospects, and the Dem welfare state policies reassured struggling middle-income voters. In fact, Biden was swamping Trump in polls by double-digits, not far from his eventual 5-point margin. Of course, the popular vote is not relevant;  Biden had a smaller lead (2.3) in battleground states but almost twice Clinton's advantage when she barely lost certain states in photo finishes. So, in sum, Trump no longer was running as an outsider but had a record to defend against a more likable election opponent, in a tough economy I realize polls can underestimate Trump's support and I don't dismiss the advantages of incumbency. But by any objective standard, Trump was holding a weaker hand of cards and his path to victory was at best statistically improbable. And Trump knew it.

The bottom line is Trump failed to win a single Clinton state and Biden posed a strong challenge in Rust Belt states Clinton barely lost. I'm not going to review the close state outcomes here. I thought the court challenges were frivolous in nature and reflected the desperation politics of a sore loser. I still regard Trump's refusal to concede as dishonorable and a stain on American history.

Trump lost nearly all court battles on disputing the election, including up to SCOTUS:

Just one case, filed Nov. 4, had to do with the election results. It centered on reducing the amount of time Pennsylvania voters had to fix errors on their mail-in ballots. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee were granted an injunction against the secretary of state to prevent extending the proof of ID period by three days. The matter involved a small number of ballots that didn’t change the outcome.

There are likely 4 sets if indictments against Trump over the coming weeks (i.e., GA): 

• the Stormy Daniels business records falsification case
• the classified documents case
• the post election/J6 case
• the GA probe over Trump's attempts to reverse GA 2020 election outcome

 I'm not going to review the indictments in detail here. I think in the first case the prosecutor is trying to stretch a misdemeanor into a felony. Clearly Trump should have paid any hush money directly. Of the 4 cases, I find it the most dubious.

I've written about the classified documents in numerous tweets and posts. To those of us who have gone through the process of getting a clearance, Trump's behavior is unconscionable. Back in 2014-5 I had a contingent Pittsburg area subcontractor offer as an Energy Department computer DBA and in past posts I've discussed eyeball-rolling moments of their background check, e.g., a former employer had gone out of business. They didn't deny the Q clearance, but after unpaid months of waiting for the clearance, I finally had to take another offer. But over the years I have worked in a SCIF, even had to qualify to. open a SCIF. I've had to take multiple trainings and refreshes on data classification policies, derivative classifications, etc. One has a lifelong commitment to protect the nation's secrets. One's background is constantly reevaluated for vulnerabilities that could be exploited by adversarial entities, e.g., financial hardship, addictions, family problems, etc.

Since I last posted the data classification charges have been extended to include Trump's role in an alleged attempt to sabotage video surveillance of access to retained classified data, an obstruction of justice. In addition, Trump is accused of sharing a classified document with unvetted associates at a golf club in the summer of 2021, a document later included in the Jan 22 NARA pickup at MAL. Note that Trump himself as ex-POTUS no longer had the need to know or rights to possess the document. Using the document to impress his unvetted friends is illegal.

I am more annoyed at Trump's disingenuous excuses that he had already declassified all the documents he stole on leaving office and his attempt to compare his case to documents to reports of classified documents found in the records of Clinton, VP Biden, and Pence. There are defined processes to declassify data; revelation of a national secret doesn't pose any less serious risk just because Trump doesn't want to deal with the inconvenience of restrictive handling. This is a key point I made in a recent essay questioning Trump's fitness to be Commander in Chief. A POTUS has broadest access to current classified data. While one can legitimately question how politicians got access to materials outside SCIF or SIPR, there's no comparing the nature and extent of Trump's documents or the fact even after being served a subpoena, he did not comply

The third indictment involves a cluster of events including attempts to get states to reverse state results and/or persuade Pence to reject enough Biden electors to throw the election into the House, not to mention his role resulting in the suspension of the electoral vote count confirming Biden's victory. Trump's lawyers are trying to make the case of Trump's First Amendment rights, which I as a libertarian regard as bogus. 

I'll refer here to one of my favorite libertarian scholars, Ilya Somin here. See also his earlier post here:

It is important to recognize that Trump isn't being charged simply because he wrongly claimed he won the election. In and of itself, that is no crime. Rather, he went far beyond that and organized a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the result using fraud and deception, and by attempting to enlist state and federal officials to assist him. The indictment goes into the means he and his co-conspirators used, in great detail.....Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election well deserves punishment from the standpoint of both retribution and deterrence. For the head of state in a democracy, there are few more serious crimes than using fraud to try to stay in power after losing an election. If successful, such action would transform the nation into a despotism, usually a deeply illiberal one to boot.  Subversion of the republic by the very person who has a special duty to defend it is obviously deserving of severe retribution, given the extraordinarily serious nature of the crime. It is also important to deter future presidents and other high-ranking officials from similar misconduct in the future. 

In Somin's second post, he cites this post by Lawfare and Walter Olson's post here. Note this conclusion to Olson's piece:

There are dangers in prosecuting ex‐​Presidents, though, aren’t there?

Yes, there undoubtedly are. Exactly one year ago I published a piece in The UnPopulist outlining my concerns about these dangers, and explained why I had concluded that in some circumstances the dangers of not prosecuting genuine and serious crime by the nation’s chief executive can be even greater.

Finally, we are awaiting the outcome of the grand jury in Atlanta, so it's premature to discuss ut here, but Trump's attempt to pressure high-level Georgia' GOP state officials to change state results is well-known and unconscionable. There's also a question of whether Trump's legal staff got unauthorized access to Georgia's election equipment.

[In a late-breaking development:

Former president Donald Trump has been indicted by a Georgia grand jury after an investigation into his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results in the Peach State.

Trump is facing 13 felony charges, including conspiracy to commit forgery, filing false documents, Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer, and violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

]