Another NY Times bombshell

Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, the New York Times Trump whisperers, are up at this hour with a new blast of inside information about the circumstances surrounding the search of Trump’s home in Florida, Mar a Lago. The headline, which trumpets — yes, I know — a scoop that heretofore has not been revealed, says that a Trump lawyer signed a written statement in June attesting that “all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government.”

The Times does not specify what kind of a signed written statement it was, or who requested it, but explains that “The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.” Normally, statements made to the FBI or the Department of Justice, which are one in the same, are subject to perjury prosecution if it is proven that the person signing the declaration lied. The Times points out that the signed statement is a possible reason that one of the statutes cited in the search warrant covered obstruction of justice, not just mishandling of classified information or government documents.

What the Times discovered is remarkable for another reason as well. The DOJ official sent to Mar a Lago in June, who spoke with Trump while he was there, was the “top counterintelligence official in the Department’s national security division.” This strongly indicates that Trump was already under investigation for mishandling or possibly illegally transferring top secret information to people unauthorized to have it, because those are the kinds of cases handled by the counterintelligence division. That the DOJ sent their top official and not some lower functionary indicates how seriously the DOJ was treating the possibility of potential criminal charges involving espionage and illegal transfer of national security information.

Also new in the Times story is this: the search warrant specified that the FBI could search not only the storage area which was known to contain boxes of material Trump had taken from the White House, but Trump’s office and personal residence. In other words, the search was not merely of Mar a Lago, it was a search of Donald Trump in all ways but his physical body.

The Times also reported that the DOJ officials who went to Mar a Lago in June left with what was called “additional material that was marked classified,” which I take to mean classified material that was in addition to what was in the 15 boxes returned to the National Archives in January. They also left the premises, the Times reported, with the signed declaration that all the classified material had been turned over.

The Times also reports, I believe for the first time, that when the National Archives discovered classified documents in the 15 boxes in January and turned the matter over to the DOJ, the department convened a grand jury and began its investigation of Trump and his handling of classified documents.

Convening a special grand jury to carry out an investigation is a very serious step and is only done when a criminal investigation is underway.

The Times reports that “over recent months, investigators were in contact with roughly half a dozen of Mr. Trump’s current aides who had knowledge of how the documents were handled.” These were not casual chats in the aides’ living rooms. If you have empaneled a grand jury, you haul anyone you want to question before the grand jury and conduct the questioning there under oath, which is doubtlessly how the DOJ obtained “information that led them to want to further press Mr. Trump for material,” according to the Times. The story indicates that a subpoena for the security footage from Mar a Lago that showed the area around the storage room also tipped off the DOJ that there might be more classified documents that Trump had not admitted to possessing.

The other big revelation in the Times story is that after the search of Mar a Lago was carried out on Monday, “a person close to Mr. Trump reached out to a Justice Department official to pass along a message from the former president to the attorney general. Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Garland to know that he had been checking in with people around the country and found them to be enraged by the search. ‘The country is on fire’ was the message that Mr. Trump wanted conveyed, according to a person familiar with the exchange. ‘What can I do to reduce the heat?’”

The “heat” to which Trump referred already included the attack on the FBI field office in Ohio that led to the death of the assailant. Trump’s “reaching out” to Merrick Garland was more than passing along rumors or idle chat. It was a threat.

The next day, the judge in Florida unsealed the warrant and inventory of the 11 boxes of classified documents the FBI had found in Mar a Lago on Monday, all of it material that one of Trump’s lawyers had sworn to the DOJ did not exist.

My reading of today’s Times story is that the DOJ now has enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice and with mishandling government documents. I don’t see any way that he won’t be indicted by the special grand jury that has apparently been sitting in Washington D.C. since January investigating Trump for violations of three federal laws, one of which is the Espionage Act.

It looks like he is going to be running as John Gotti. He won’t have a choice.