Judge Michael Luttig: There is not an Attorney General of either party who would not have brought today’s charges against the former president. He has dared, taunted, provoked, and goaded DOJ to prosecute him from the moment it was learned that he had taken these national security documents. On any given day for the past 18 months — doubtless up to and including the day before the indictment was returned — the former president could have avoided and prevented this prosecution. He would never have been indicted for taking these documents. But for whatever reason, he decided that he would rather be indicted and prosecuted. After a year and a half, he finally succeeded in forcing Jack Smith’s appropriately reluctant hand, having left the Department no choice but to bring these charges lest the former president make a mockery of the Constitution and the Rule of Law. I’m actually pretty sure that ship sailed when they had to issue a warrant to get the rest of the documents. After all, they didn’t charge him for any of the documents he returned, even under a subpoena.
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And the establishment is full MAGA Happy Birthday Donald Trump. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. A mere lad of seventy-seven, you have a very exciting year ahead of you, running for president for the third time while facing multiple felony charges in both New York and Miami (and very likely Washington DC and Atlanta too!) And you will be the center of attention once again, just the way you like it. Yesterday, Donald Trump was arraigned on 37 federal felony charges for his decision to abscond with extremely sensitive classified documents, store them haphazardly in his wide-open beach club and then refuse to give them back to the government when asked politely to do so. Unless the special counsel’s office has found some evidence that will explain this bizarre behavior we will probably be left arguing about his motives forever. Was it a psychological need to hoard them or simply a product of his extreme mental disorganization? Did he see a monetary value in them or perhaps he had it in mind to use them as leverage for his political future, as he did when he extorted the Ukrainian president to to help him sabotage Joe Biden’s campaign?
It’s a shame that we can’t even have audio recordings of the legal proceedings against Donald Trump since the events are of great political and historical importance but it does not appear that is going to be. So it will be up to media in the courtrooms to tell us what happened. I heard lots of bits and pieces yesterday but didn’t really have a sense of how it actually unfolded. This from Anna Bower at Lawfare is most straightforward narration of the arraignment yesterday that I’ve come across. (She waited in line for 27 hours to get in!) When I finally enter courtroom 13-3, 27 hours later, Trump is already seated at a table on the right-hand side of the room. Overhead, a warm white light appears to shine directly on the former president, casting his orange-blonde hair in a golden hue. He is, both literally and metaphorically, in the limelight. Yet it strikes me that Trump—the man who positioned bigness as a central issue of American politics (“hugely,” “bigly,” “little Marco”)—looks unmistakably small. The courtroom is large, almost cavernous, adorned with slabs of creamy marble and caramel wood.
From Ed Whelen on twitter: In today’s WSJ, Judicial Watch’s Michael Bekesha claims that Presidential Records Act gives an outgoing president complete authority to “decide what records to return and what records to keep at the end of his presidency.” Bizarro World account of PRA. Bekesha makes wild wrong turn in his very first sentence. Indictment is *not* predicated in any way on PRA. As Andrew McCarthy explains here classified docs Trump retained were *agency records* outside scope of PRA. Frivolous Trump Argument No. 1: Classified Intelligence Reports Compiled by Government Agencies Are ‘Personal Records’ under the Presidential Records Act | National ReviewAgency intelligence records are not even presidential records under the PRA, much less a president’s personal records. @mentionsPRA’s definition of “presidential records” excludes “agency records” from their scope. That of course doesn’t make them “personal records.” It instead means that PRA doesn’t govern them at all.
Norms no longer quaint, says Torture Dude Mar-a-Lago’s Hoarder-in-Chief heads to his arraignment in Miami this afternoon on federal charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith of willful retention of national defense information, obstruction and conspiracy. The “Florida Republican Assembly” has chartered four or more buses to bring Donald Trump’s supporters from Orlando to make a show of their fealty to Dear Leader. The group’s executive director, Lou Marin, tells the Miami Herald his group is a “Judeo-Christan grassroots organization committed to restoring the Republican Party to it’s founding principles.” He didn’t specify. The day will tell whether how many will show or if armed terrorists will be among them. Bush administration torture memo author John Yoo knows how the United States should deal with terrorists. But that was two decades ago. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law has seen his reputation whitewashed by outlets such as the New York Times and now Bloomberg Law.
Get busy fighting or brace for democracy dying “A Red Alert for Voting Rights” is the Zoom call scheduled tomorrow by Carolina Forward. The topic is North Carolina politics. But the red alert is broader than that. Twitter followers of former Ohio state Democratic Party chair, David Pepper (“Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American“), know he’s been leaning hard into Ohio Republicans’ attempt to thwart a citizen initiative to secure abortion rights in the state constitution. The GOP-dominated legislature has scheduled an August special election to pass a constitutional amendment that would make it harder for citizens to pass their “Right to Reproductive Freedom” amendment in November.
Tom Nichols on how to deal with the threats: I made a joke on Twitter the other day that I thought deserved a better reception than it got. I was reading about Kari Lake bleating about how other Americans, if they wanted to “get” to Donald Trump, would have to “go through me” as well as “through 75 million Americans just like me … most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.” I said that Lake’s political career was like the origin story of Jonathan Matthias. I made that joke because I’m a nerd and I’m old. Matthias is the bad guy from the classic 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man,a postapocalyptic thriller in which almost everyone in the world is wiped out by a germ-warfare disaster. Heston has an antidote; the other survivors end up as light-sensitive ghouls that can go out only at night. Matthias (played by the legendary character actor Anthony Zerbe) was, before the plague, a blustery celebrity television newscaster, and he later uses his charisma to organize his fellow sorta-vampires into a cult built around hating Heston and all modern technology.
And right in the middle of all that was this: What???
I think we can almost certainly count on shenanigans from her. She’s obviously MAGA and it’s very bad luck that the case wound up back under her. Charlie Savage at the NY Times breaks down the possibilities: Last year, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, briefly disrupted the documents investigation by issuing rulings favorable to him when he challenged the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida club and estate, Mar-a-Lago, before a conservative appeals court ruled that she never had legal authority to intervene. It remains to be seen how she will handle her second turn in the spotlight. The scope of her role before the trial also is unclear: She is not presiding over Mr. Trump’s initial hearing on Tuesday, and could refer some pretrial motions to a magistrate judge who works under her. But here is a closer look at how her decisions as the judge presiding over the trial — like on what can be included and excluded — could affect the case. Slowing the Calendar Mr. Trump has long pursued a strategy of trying to delay legal proceedings against him to run out the clock.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) pierced the Fox News bubble on Monday, pushing back on host Sean Hannity’s claims about President Joe Biden, mocking House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and ripping Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over his treatment of migrants. Hannity tried to defend DeSantis, who has been shipping migrants around the country in what critics have ripped as a political stunt done to raise his profile as a 2024 presidential candidate. But Newsom wasn’t having it. “Why do you use people as pawns?” Newsom asked. “What faith tradition teaches you to treat human beings like this ― to belittle them, to demean them?” Hannity suggested a TV debate ― moderated by himself, of course ― between Newsom and DeSantis. “I’m all in, count on it,” Newsom said. “You would do a two-hour debate with Ron DeSantis?” Hannity said. “Make it three,” Newsom said. “Do it with one-day notice with no notes, I look forward to that.