New wrinkles in the Trump documents story

If you are not reading the Emptywheel blog, you should be

Moving day at the White House. NY Times photo.

I guess we should have assumed right from the beginning that Russia Russia Russia was back there somewhere behind Trump’s removal of thousands of documents from the White House when he left office.  Among them were hundreds of highly classified documents containing some of the nation’s most important national security secrets, including, we have learned, at least one document marked Top Secret/ Compartmented Sensitive Information, concerning nuclear weapons.

Yesterday, Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times reported that last year, as the National Archives was fruitlessly seeking the return of a dozen or more boxes of documents and other materials Trump had taken from the White House in January of 2021, Trump discussed with his lawyers trying to make a deal to trade the documents he had illegally taken for “a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims” that he had been wronged by the FBI and the Mueller investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia.  “In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla,” the Times reported.

But is this an aha moment, or not?  The Times seems to think it isn’t, describing the offer to make a trade with the National Archives as just “one in a series that demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.”

However, Marcy Wheeler of the Emptywheel blog, thinks it is a very big aha moment. Read on to learn why.