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In response to his federal indictment, Donald Trump has lashed out wildly, blaming a wide range of perceived villains for his dilemma. The former president has blamed special counsel Jack Smith. And President Joe Biden. And the Justice Department. And the media. And Attorney General Merrick Garland. On Wednesday, he even blamed “mutants,” though it wasn’t altogether clear to whom he was referring.
The obvious problem with the Republican’s whining is that he’s stuck in a mess of his own creation. No one forced Trump to take classified documents to a glorified country club. No one twisted his arm, urging him to defy a federal subpoena. No one directed the former president to show sensitive materials to people without clearances, encourage those around him to lie, or engage in a clumsy cover-up.
Trump, in other words, brought this on himself. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown summarized this week, “It is because of his own actions that he is the one facing conviction.”
But there’s another dimension to this that has received far less attention. The former president not only invited an indictment through his alleged misconduct, he reportedly put his legal future in jeopardy by failing to listen to good advice from his own lawyers — advice that very likely would’ve prevented his indictment.
The Washington Post reported overnight:
One of Donald Trump’s new attorneys proposed an idea in the fall of 2022: The former president’s team could try to arrange a settlement with the Justice Department. The attorney, Christopher Kise, wanted to quietly approach Justice to see if he could negotiate a settlement that would preclude charges, hoping Attorney General Merrick Garland and the department would want an exit ramp to avoid prosecuting a former president. Kise would hopefully “take the temperature down,” he told others, by promising a professional approach and the return of all documents.
The smart move for Trump would’ve been to reply, “That sounds great, let’s do that.” But he did not choose the smart course.
Instead, according to the Post’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the former president talked to others — most notably Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch — “who urged a more pugilistic approach.”
Trump, the article added, “was not interested” in Kise’s strategy.
The problem, of course, is that Kise’s strategy likely would’ve worked. We can say this with some certainty because, as we discussed yesterday, federal prosecutors gave Trump a pass on the documents he took but gave back. If the former president had returned all of the materials he improperly took, and cooperated with law enforcement, it’s easy to believe this whole mess would’ve gone away.
But Trump preferred to listen to those who said it’d be better to fight — instead of the lawyers who reportedly kept trying to explain that he’d be far better off if he didn’t need to fight. “Trump time and again rejected the advice from lawyers and advisers who urged him to cooperate,” the article added.
One person close to Trump who has been part of dozens of discussions about the documents, told the Post, “It was a totally unforced error. We didn’t have to be here.”
The former president paid good money to hire good counsel who gave him good advice. It seems what Trump didn’t have was the judgment needed to know that it was in his interest to take that advice.