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Over the weekend, we learned the National Archives apparently has reason to believe that it still hasn’t recovered all of the documents former President Donald Trump had in his possession after he left the White House.
“While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should,” acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall wrote in a letter Friday to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the chairwoman of the Oversight and Reform Committee.
Everyone still of the belief that prosecuting Trump would represent some fatal departure from normalcy would do well to open their eyes and see that the corrosion of norms has already occurred.
In lieu of punishment, Trump is effectively behaving like a tyrant without needing any official title to assert that power. He’s hoarding valuable government property, presumably operating in spaces where his possession of that property bolsters his idea of power, and seemingly threatening his political enemies.
And we need to be honest about how the American justice system, in all its inequality, has enabled him. Justice Department trepidation and a conservative judge have essentially established a new threat in Trump: a pseudo-presidential enterprise that is paid deference to and handled with kid gloves.
On Monday, reports from The Washington Post and The New York Times put a finer point on Trump’s alleged criminality by reporting that he had asked one of his lawyers to say he had returned all the documents to the National Archives, when the lawyer wasn’t sure that was true. MSNBC and NBC News have not independently verified the reports.
According to the Post:
Attempts to get Trump’s representatives to falsely state he had no presidential records in his possession could serve as evidence that he was intentionally and knowingly withholding documents. And if Trump continued to pressure aides to make false statements even after learning the Justice Department was involved in retrieving the documents, authorities could see those efforts as an attempt to obstruct their investigation.
Perhaps the Justice Department has already moved swiftly to acquire any documents Trump may still have at his Florida estate — or anywhere else, for that matter. Perhaps the Justice Department has sought and gotten another court-approved subpoena to investigate Trump’s home.
But that seems implausible given how Trump ordinarily reacts publicly and angrily to investigative developments. So the question, for me, becomes: “What’s the holdup?”
It’s hard to imagine federal investigators getting a tip about, say, a drug trafficking ring, having reason to believe the evidence is still at the scene of the crime, and refusing to retrieve it. And everything we’ve heard from national security experts on “The ReidOut” over the past few months suggests that the top-secret documents already recovered from Trump’s home are more significant than a brick of cocaine.
So here we are, in all-too-familiar territory, waiting anxiously for the Justice Department to mete out justice to Trump the same way it has seen fit to pursue low-level offenders — preferably before the ex-president is able to re-establish his power beyond the Justice Department’s control.