Not for any nefarious purpose, but because Trump likes things.” “That was the actual reason he had documents. The theory I had from the beginning was correct that basically Trump was like, ‘I like that document, it’s nice,’” claims Ben Shapiro. “The rumors at the time that this broke was that he was selling off our nuclear codes to the Chinese or some such nonsense. The defense has fallen back to insisting that at least Trump didn’t steal intelligence secrets and sell them to hostile foreign powers. The indictment also depicts Trump making a “plucking motion” to his lawyer in relation to the boxes, as if to say, “If there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” I don’t imagine him wanting to take the boxes,” Trump’s valet, Walter Nauta, wrote in one text message obtained by Special Counsel Jack Smith. ![]() “Did you ever do that?”Īs it turns out, Trump did exactly that. “I can’t imagine you ever saying, um, ‘Bring me some of the boxes that we brought back from the White House, I’d like to look at them,’” Sean Hannity suggested to Trump in March. The early version of this rationalization posited that Trump never even bothered to look through the boxes he insisted on keeping. But this defense is less certain than its proponents pretend, and more importantly, it hardly provides any basis for getting him off the hook. His defenders have filled in this absence by treating the most innocuous explanation as proven correct. ![]() Smith’s indictment leaves alone the question of why Trump so persistently defied government demands. Sure, maybe Trump took some boxes he wasn’t supposed to, and held on to them after the government demanded their return, and ordered a wee cover-up to throw the FBI off the trail. Donald Trump’s scheme to steal government documents has become so blatant and undeniable that many of his most habitual defenders have abandoned any legal defense and retreated to a sort of “boys will be boys” rationalization.
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