Donald Trump has been indicted by the United States Department of Justice for 37 criminal charges related to withholding secret information, obstruction of justice and false testimony for classified documents that he illegally took from the White House to his Mar-a mansion. -Lake, in Florida. Some documents that he kept, according to the indictment, in the showers, toilets, his bedroom, an office, the basement, and even on the stage of the music band in the Mar-a-Lago dance hall . Trump’s country club which, as the document states, was the scene of more than 150 events, many of them in that ballroom, “in which tens of thousands of people participated.”
Trump also traveled with them to his other country club, Bedminster, in the state of New Jersey, near New York, where he often spends the summer to escape the humid Florida heat, and showed them off to those close to him. His valet, Waltine Nauta, who was in charge of moving the dozens of boxes in which the hundreds of secret documents were, has also been prosecuted, in his case for lying to the authorities.
According to the indictment, what was in the “hundreds of classified documents” were not exactly White House recipes. Trump took, without any kind of authorization, “information regarding the defense and military capabilities of the United States and its allies; the United States’ nuclear program; possible vulnerabilities of the United States to a military attack; and plans about of possible retaliatory actions against an attack [on the US]”, according to the document on its second page.
The former president showed at least two of those documents to third parties in Bedminster. The first time was in July 2021, when he showed “an attack plan that had been prepared for him by the Department of Defense and high command of the Armed Forces” while he was president. A month or two later he showed another person another map of a “considered top secret” military operation.
The first of these meetings was recorded on audio, with Trump’s knowledge, since one of those present was preparing a book about his participation in the government of the former president. On both occasions, Trump bragged that the documents were “top secret” and even said that “now I can’t declassify them” [i.e., make them public], which explicitly contradicts his line of defense that he, as a former President, you can decide what is secret and what is not on the spot, without having to ask anyone’s permission or even having to say it out loud. His will, according to Trump, is enough.
The prosecutor’s document verges on the swagger when it describes how Trump ordered the documents to be kept in a basement room at Mar-a-Lago that is connected to the pool and located next to the laundry room, the wine cellar, and the room where the bed sheets. Reading that, one might think that, if the entire case is a failure of the US security services, it is also a failure of its rivals, because countries like China, Russia or Iran apparently never found out that together with the laundry of In Mar-a-Lago, in cardboard boxes, were hundreds of documents classified as top secret, to which non-U.S. citizens could not have access, and which sometimes contained “information the disclosure of which could cause exceptionally serious damage to the security national” of the United States.
At certain moments, the prosecution seems to be describing a cartoon from Mortadelo and Filemón, with Mar-a-Lago employees exchanging desperate SMS because they could not find a place for the dozens of boxes that opened and left scattered documents, as when one did a photo of a paper whose access is only allowed to members of the five eyes, that is, the espionage alliance formed by the five great Anglo-Saxon powers of the world, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. There is also SMS from a Trump family member – who appears to be his wife, Melania – to Nauta telling him that even if the former president wanted to put the boxes on his private plane – presumably to take them to Bedminster – “There is NO room in the plane”.
Donald Trump knows that Justice goes one way and politics the other. Sometimes the two intersect. But at other times they follow divergent paths. He is a specialist in achieving the latter. And, as his legal problems worsen, his popularity among voters for his party rises.
The former president and Republican candidate is summoned before a Miami court on Tuesday at 3 pm local time (9 pm in Spain), when the charges against him will presumably be read.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project