Trump Lawyers Demand House Republicans Put A Stop To Special Counsel Documents Investigation

(Photo by Ali Shaker/VOA)

Yesterday, Donald Trump's lawyers threw the Hail-est of Hail Mary passes to their pals on the House Intelligence Committee. In a letter, they begged the members to order the Justice Department "to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this Committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate."

Naturally these lawyers do not specify by what congressional authority Republicans might order the executive branch to "stand down" on anything. But in the context of this batsh*t letter, it hardly seems to matter. Clearly they hope to prod Trump's congressional allies to seize the pretext of legislating document retention procedures in the executive branch to throw a wrench in the DOJ's investigation before it's too late.

"It has become abundantly clear through this investigation that the institutional practice and procedures within the White House for the handling of classified materials drastically differ from the long-established standard operating procedures employed by various agencies of the intelligence community as well as the U.S. military," reads a letter from "A legislative solution by Congress is required to prevent the DOJ from continuing to conduct ham-handed criminal investigations of matters that are inherently not criminal. "

Help us, Obi-wan Mike Turner, you're our only hope!

The "Factual Background" begins by claiming that Donald Trump can't be blamed for taking so many classified documents out of the White House because every other president in this millennia had four extra years to pack.

When President Trump left office, there was little time to prepare for the outgoing transition from the presidency. Unlike his three predecessors, each of whom had over four years to prepare for their departure upon completion of their second term, President Trump had a much shorter time to wind up his administration.

It was the fault of the American people because they ... didn't vote for him? Is there perhaps some other reason that Trump himself might not have prepared to leave the Oval Office in a timely fashion? If so, the letter fails to mention it.

Instead it blames the National Archives because "NARA unfortunately has become overtly political and declined to provide archival assistance to President Trump's transition team." And thus he was obliged to do it himself and pocket hundreds of classified documents, as well as numerous keepsakes and presidential records.

In support of this allegation, Trump's lawyers point to a statement NARA put out in October of 2022 to counter false allegations by Trump that sought to diminish the seriousness of his own retention of classified documents by suggesting that other presidents had done much worse.

"President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified," he screeched into the ether on August 12. "How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!"

Clearly NARA wasn't admitting that it told Trump to pack his crap on his own, forcing him to rely on "White House staffers and General Service Administration ('GSA') employees [who] quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida." They were defining presidential libraries for someone who, like his lawyers, insists on pretending not to understand something for the benefit of his intended audience.

Although consistency is hardly these attorneys' strong suit, since in the very next paragraph they insist that they "reviewed all 15 boxes at NARA earlier this year," and due to the meticulous organization have divined exactly what classified documents have since been removed by the FBI.

They insist that "the decision to have DOJ, rather than ODNI, conduct a review of what happened is probably the Executive Branch's single biggest blunder," without acknowledging that the Intelligence Community, of which the ODNI is a member, has been running a parallel investigation -- something Jim Trusty knows very well since he litigated it in the abortive lawsuit before Judge Aileen Cannon over the Mar-a-Lago search warrant.

There is of course substantial whataboutism, eliding the difference between President Biden and Mike Pence, who both went looking for documents and immediately contacted the Justice Department to return them, and Trump, who refused demands to turn them over for upwards of a year.

"By unleashing a grand jury subpoena, DOJ intended to put President Trump on the defensive, not to invite his cooperation," they write, apparently with a straight face, even going so far as to add that "DOJ's unnecessarily aggressive use of a grand jury subpoena was not intended to ensure full compliance."

The whole thing is bonkers, and highly suggestive of a state of panic in the Trump camp about a potentially impending indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith and the grand jury investigating the former president's retention of government records. House Intel Chair Mike Turner is no Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, so it remains to be seen if he takes Trump up on the assignment to try to bone the Special Counsel investigation the way Jordan has tried to mess with the Manhattan District Attorney's indictment.

Either way, the smell of fear is thick in the air.

Parlatore Letter

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.