I ❤️ Crime
In which I sincerely ask: who is going to volunteer to be the one to physically bring Donald Trump’s ass to prison???
Has this ever happened to you: you’re let go from your cushy office job but your firing was just so unfair so to retaliate against your company, you steal some boxes with a few projects you were working on, fun notes from and about your colleagues, and, of course, the nuclear codes?
This just happened to me and it’s really comforting to not be going through it alone.
Obviously, I’ve been absolutely itching to talk about the FBI raiding Mar-a-Lago—or the FBI’s insurrection, depending on how you choose to look at reality. This week, we’re going to break down some of the ongoing lawsuits Donald Trump is currently involved in, the significance of last Monday’s raid (past getting Marjorie Taylor Greene to demand we defund law enforcement on Twitter), and what could potentially come from all of this.
First They Came For Rudy Giuliani…
Last Monday, the FBI executed a search warrant of Mar-a-Lago and retrieved boxes and binders of classified information that appears to have been taken from the White House.1 Why it has taken two years to realize a box containing materials requiring the highest level of security clearance was missing is Christopher Wray’s problem and not mine, but the retrieval has sparked a number of new developments.
The first development, which we won’t dwell on today, is how the right-wing has been saying the quiet part of one of their arguments out loud: they only support law enforcement so long as it works for them. As Adam Serwer wrote last week in The Atlantic,
There are people against whom law-enforcement action or abuse is always justified, and there are people against whom it can never be justified. That is, if law-enforcement officials want to murder an unarmed Black man in the street, brutalize protesters against police misconduct, or investigate a Democratic presidential candidate, conservatives will insist that such officers are infallible and that any criticism of their conduct is outrageous. But when the law is used to investigate or restrict the conduct of people deemed by conservatives to be above its prohibitions, that is axiomatically an abuse of power.
The main thing is that the raid appears to have revealed another investigation into three federal laws Trump has allegedly broken that the public previously did not know about. For everyone keeping track at home, in addition to these new crimes, the former president is currently embroiled in the following investigations:
Here’s the kicker: these are just the cases generating news coverage right now. There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to cataloging all notable recent cases (STILL not all of them!!!!) involving Trump. Friends... it has subheaders about which kind of crime the case pertains to.
But I digress. There was immediately widespread interest in this case as well as a few—shall we say—very heated negative reactions to things that don’t belong to Trump being taken out of his home. In response, Attorney General Merrick Garland filed a motion to unseal the warrant which revealed that Trump is being investigated for, among other things, violating the Espionage Act.
The Espionage Act pertains to the "retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material," so simply having the seized boxes in his home was enough for Trump to violate this law as a number of them contained classified material. None of the three federal laws listed in the warrant make any claims about what the FBI and Department of Justice explicitly believe Trump has done or would do with the classified material and Trump himself has not been charged with a crime related to this investigation, but the implication of what this could become has everyone buzzing.
The implication is that Trump held onto the nuclear codes or something akin to them in terms of classification status and holy-shit-he-still-has-that??-ness. There is the further implication that all of this is so much worse than anything we’re thinking: just today, it was reported that the Department of Justice opposes making the probable cause affidavit (aka the legal document that details which of Trump’s actions are being investigated) public, “saying it ‘implicates highly classified materials.’”
"Disclosure of the government's affidavit at this stage would also likely chill future cooperation by witnesses whose assistance may be sought as this investigation progresses, as well as in other high-profile investigations," the Justice Department wrote. "The fact that this investigation implicates highly classified materials further underscores the need to protect the integrity of the investigation and exacerbates the potential harm if information is disclosed to the public prematurely or improperly." (X)
I’d be remiss not to mention the implication that, following reports of someone close to Trump telling the FBI and DOJ about the materials still left at Mar-a-Lago, Jared Kushner is the rat around town.
But the biggest implication is that this raid was the most damning thing to happen to a president—more so than getting caught having an affair and being impeached, or getting caught covering up a crime that you swore up and down you would take no mercy prosecuting—and that this is just the very tip of the iceberg that takes Trump down.
Contrary to all of the previous Emily For President installments, I hate to be Debbie Downer. However, I’m not exactly hopeful that anything we find out will take down the Trumptanic.2
So… Did We Get Him?
Here is the course of mental gymnastics I’ve been doing lately as I try to think up a scenario in which Donald Trump is charged and convicted of crimes: Roger Stone was convicted on seven felony counts in 2019 and sentenced to 40 months in prison. He never served a day because his sentence was commuted (or, made less severe) before Trump ultimately pardoned him in 2020.3
Obviously, the current president is not going to pardon Trump should he be convicted for any crime or penalty in any investigation the way Trump pardoned his guilty girlies. But even without a pardon, I don’t think Trump will ever serve any sentence he receives. Now, you may be saying, “That’s not how our legal system works. You can’t just say ‘I don’t want to do that’ when you’re found guilty and sentenced,” and I just need you to bear with me for a second.
Let’s say that Trump is tried for a crime or, a step further, is found guilty of a crime. Riddle me this: who is going to be an impartial juror in a case trying a former president, be it at the state or federal level? Who is going to determine what his sentence looks like? Who is going to enforce any sentence he receives? Literally—who is going to volunteer to be the one to physically bring Donald Trump’s ass to prison???
Alex Jones currently finds himself in a similar predicament as a deeply controversial and divisive figure who is on trial for something we all watched him do. But, unlike Trump, Jones is someone the right is willing to sacrifice—no one is going to riot over a guilty Alex Jones verdict the way they would over a guilty Trump verdict.
No matter if everything is done right, no matter if the jury is impartial and a sentence is decided upon and one person is like, “Sure, I’ll transport the convict,” we will never “get” Trump. Regardless of the outcome of a trial, he will never admit that he’s guilty because he’s been programmed since the 1970s to never admit defeat.
Apologies to my haters but when Roy Cohn was disbarred, he claimed that it wasn’t because he had done anything wrong but rather that his enemies were able to get one over on him. In a 1985 interview, eight months before he was formally disbarred,
Cohn denies any wrongdoing, and gets animated when the subject is pursued. He calls the members of the panel a "bunch of little people" and says they are biased against him.
"The bar proceeding is absolutely nothing to me," he says. "Bill Buckley had a line once, he talked about little people who get their kicks out of embarrassing people more successful than they are. And there's the jealousy motive . . . The law has been very good to me, I've been very successful at the law, I've won a lot of cases, lost very few, and I'm not part of the 'old boy' group. I'm anti, I'm an iconoclast.
Whereas Roy’s inability to admit defeat was a conscious strategy, it has become Trump’s entire ethos to the point where he might genuinely believe he is the most innocent, hardworking, sexiest man alive who 10000% won the 2020 election.
But far more dangerous than Trump refusing to accept his guilt are his followers who will never accept it either. In the last week, violent threats against federal law enforcement officials have begun to spike online. Additionally, an insurrectionist attacked an FBI field office in Ohio on Tuesday, reminding everyone that there is a sizable percentage of the population who genuinely believe everything coming out of Trump’s mouth and are willing to die for him—perhaps even kill for him, too.
The whole thing is just so textbook cult because, as is so in all other cults, it genuinely feels like there is no way to get to Trump without dealing with the MAGA people surrounding him. In a way, he did finally get his wall!! Although I think the metaphor might be lost on him.
More From Killjoy For President Over Here
Americans are not all working with the same slate of facts anymore—Donald Trump and TikTok manifestation videos have shown us that reality is what we make of it, and his supporters (along with all the Law of Attraction girlies) have taken that lesson to heart.
While it’s tantalizing to think that the DOJ or Letitia James or a spiteful God has something coming for Trump that will once and for all put him in his place, that’s just no longer the world we live in. Or, and I’m big enough to admit this, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve just become too cynical over the past few years to believe in justice and all that jazz.
In 2020, Matt Tyrnauer, director of Where’s My Roy Cohn?, stated that “‘the open question... is whether Trump’s luck will hold up or whether—like Cohn—he’ll run out of road and face a tsunami of legal difficulties that will diminish him or put an end to the game that he’s played so effectively.’” As Tyrnauer explains, the last lesson Roy had for Trump was to show that “‘he got away with it... until he didn’t.’” Unfortunately, this argument came before we saw what Trump’s zealots were capable of. It also neglects to acknowledge that disbarment wasn’t what stopped Roy—death did.4
The fact of the matter is that we have watched Trump commit crimes in plain sight and yet, it is still impossible to get a unanimous agreement on the statement, “Donald Trump committed crimes.”
The implication (to bring it full circle) that Trump and his people have unsubtly put out to the world is that there will be whitewash at the White House or there will be war. When your opposition claims that any move you make is a political attack instead of regular schmegular due process, when they threaten your safety for saying anything that deviates from their skewed version of the truth, when they refuse to ever admit defeat, you’ll only be trying to prove your case to yourself.
I guess the old saying is true…
This is the second time the FBI has removed materials from Mar-a-Lago. After the last search, one of Trump’s lawyers “signed [a] document saying all classified material had been removed.”
I hate sounding like a Fox News host trying to be coy with my wordplay, but come on—low-hanging fruit.
A document pertaining to Stone’s pardon was also one of the items the FBI searched for last Monday which is…. interesting to me.
If the FBI is listening, this is not a threat of any kind!!! I’m simply stating that Roy Cohn would have shown up on Fox News as a “legal analyst” after getting disbarred had he not been withering away for two years by the time of his trial. Also, would you like some more muffins?
Oof a journey thank you for this