Late breaking news on the Trump tape

The Trump tape story is developing tonight at quite a fast pace.  Although it is not known how Special Prosecutor Jack Smith came into possession of the tape, it is beginning to appear that he may have subpoenaed it from the two writers working with Mark Meadows on his White House memoir.  It could also have been subpoenaed from a Trump aide who was present in the room for the interview at Trump’s Bedminster golf resort in July 2021.  A reporter for the Washington Post who interviewed Trump in the Spring of 2021 for a book she and another Post reporter were writing said that Trump had aides in the room recording the interview at the same time the reporters were running their own recorders. 

So we now know that reporters interviewing Trump are permitted to tape record their interviews with him, and that Trump himself keeps a tape of all interviews “for fact checking purposes,” as the Post reporter explained tonight.

A former prosecutor on MSNBC also speculated tonight that the appearance of the tape made at Bedminster may be an indication that Special Prosecutor Smith has opened another line of inquiry in the investigation into the possibility that Trump had additional classified documents he had removed from either the White House or subsequently from Mar a Lago and taken with him for the summer of 2021 to Bedminster. 

It is known that in 2022 Trump had boxes of documents moved around within Mar a Lago on June 2, the day before Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran invited DOJ officials to fly to Palm Beach to receive the 38 classified documents they turned over on June 3.

It looks to me at this point that there is a possibility that the “rehearsal” movement of documents Trump is said to have held before he received the subpoena from the DOJ on May 11, 2022, may have been something else altogether:  the actual movement of six document boxes out of Mar a Lago to Trump’s private plane on May 8 when he left Florida to spend the rest of the summer in Bedminster, New Jersey.  What if the workers at Mar a Lago who described the “rehearsal” in their grand jury testimony were describing the gathering and movement of the six document boxes before May 8?  The people shown in the Daily Mail photos carrying the documents from big black SUV’s across the tarmac and loading them into Trump’s airplane were not Mar a Lago workers.  They were Trump aides, male and female, wearing business attire.  It could be possible that Trump ordered Mar a Lago workers to move the document boxes for “practice” in a “rehearsal” to a certain area of Mar a Lago before May 8, and then on that date, Trump had his own personal aides move the same document boxes into the SUV’s, and from there, into the plane in which he flew to Bedminster.

There is one last wrinkle to the tape story.  Trump apparently told the interviewers working for Meadows in July of 2021 that he had a classified document with a plan to attack Iran that had been prepared by General Mark Milley, and thus it wasn’t him who wanted to attack Iran, as the New Yorker story implied, but General Milley.  This characterization of the classified document containing a plan by Milley to attack Iran is bogus on at least two levels. 

One, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doesn’t draw up plans of attack himself.  Such memos are regularly drawn up by Pentagon officers as contingency plans, “what if” documents laying out a response if Iran explodes a nuclear weapon, for example, or attacks Israel.  The Pentagon doesn’t like to be caught flat-footed if such disasters strike, so they always have a stack of responses to consider if such a thing happens.

Two, the president is periodically briefed about such contingency plans during daily intelligence briefings because as commander in chief, he would be the one to give the order to execute such a plan if and when the time came.  So, what Trump probably took out of the White House in January of 2021 was a top-secret document or documents containing contingency plans for Iran, Russia, China – you name it – with Milley’s name on it as the originating officer because as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley was the Pentagon official tasked as the president’s top military adviser.  Of course, if Trump was briefed on a potential response to any kind of Iranian provocation or attack on an ally of the United States, the top-secret document would have Milley’s name on it.  He’s the guy who provided the document to Trump as president.

Which just goes to show you that one of the things on Trump’s mind on the day he left the White House on January 20, 2021, was that he wanted ammunition to take with him to get back at those who had wronged him while he was president, Milley among them.  Trump has always had an enemies list, or lists, and now we know that he had armed himself with top-secret documents to use as retribution against his enemies.

And Trump’s obsession with holding grudges has come back to bite him in the ass. What a surprise, huh?