Tag: Justice Department

As reports suggest that Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith will charge failed former president Donald Trump as soon as this week with crimes related to his mishandling of classified documents and perhaps for his role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, The Daily Beast says that Trump’s attorneys are engaged in backbiting and infighting.

There’s also plenty of paranoia among the Trump legal team, with the attorneys fearful that their colleagues have been talking to prosecutors working for the Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice already has one Trump attorney’s professional notes, which could position him as a future witness against his own client, and the DOJ has another lawyer who said too much in an unrelated case and has positioned herself as yet another potential witness against her client.

As you’d expect from any lawyer desperate enough to defend Trump, there’s also the alleged incompetence of one attorney, Boris Epshteyn, who has reportedly blocked his more experienced colleagues from using legal strategies that could benefit the one-term, twice-impeached ex-president.

Add to that toxic mix a large dose of paranoia and you get a perfect storm of tension and nerves that is causing some members of the legal team to wonder if perhaps they’re discussing legal strategy with a colleague who may be giving daily reports to the Justice Department, perhaps even to Special Counsel Smith himself.

Worst of all, now that federal investigators have turned the interrogation spotlight on some of Trump’s lawyers themselves, defense attorneys on the team seem to be questioning whether their colleagues may actually turn into snitches.

Imagine trying to work in such a crazy atmosphere. It’s enough to make you wonder if perhaps Jack Smith already has a slam dunk case against Trump and is just waiting to see how much dirt he can get before he has to go public with the indictments.

Sleep well, Donnie!

Ever since Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel to look over the alleged crimes committed by failed one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump, the disgraced ex-president has been on the attack, suggesting that Smith is a partisan and one of the worst people to ever trod the face of the planet, which is especially ironic coming from someone as immoral and downright evil as Trump.

Salon provided a brief rundown of some of the more disgusting things Trump has said about Smith.

Upon Smith’s appointment last year, Trump wrote that he was a “Trump Hating THUG” and a “fully weaponized monster.” This quickly spread, with some of Trump’s biggest supporters in Washington, including Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Elise Stefanik, and Rep. Jim Jordan, also arguing that Smith and the Department of Justice were corrupt. A few months later, Trump began questioning whether Jack Smith was the prosecutor’s real name, and went so far as to call him an “unfair Savage.” The name-questioning got so bad (“What did his name used to be?”) that Smith’s hometown paper felt compelled to track down Smith’s high school yearbook, and now, the whole world can ponder his 1980s borderline-mullet situation. (He is, indeed, identified as Jack Smith, Class of ’87).

Considering that Smith will soon let the world know whether Trump will be charged with espionage, obstruction of justice, and mishandling of classified material (all felonies), you’d think Donald’s attorneys would tell to shut the hell up and let the entire matter play out.

But since Trump has the self-control of a two-year-old, he simply cannot resist lobbing one insult after another in Smith’s direction, which is odd behavior for someone who could potentially spend the rest of his life in prison if Smith decides to file charges.

Why, you might wonder, does Trump engage in such counterproductive behavior against the wishes of his legal counsel?

That’s the question Shirin Ali put to Robert Katzberg, a former federal prosecutor.

To Katzberg, it’s a simple case of Trump being characteristically impulsive and reacting emotionally. “I just don’t think he’s able to control himself. Any experienced lawyer would have resigned a long time before that.”

Children tend to act emotionally rather than rationally or strategically, and that’s certain the psychological blueprint many experts on human behavior have laid out when it comes to Trump: He may be a 76-year-old man, but he acts like a spoiled 5-year-old shitheel.

Katzberg added: “(Trump) has the thinnest skin of any human being in history and is incapable of keeping his mouth closed.”

Insecurity and thin skin. It’s the sort of combination you might feel pity for if you saw it in a friend or relative. But when it emanates from someone as pathologically hateful as Donald Trump, it just makes you hate the person. And that hatred is why the loser ex-president is likely headed to prison or for a landslide electoral defeat if he isn’t criminally charged.

Now that we know Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed financial information from the Trump Organization on possible business deals with seven foreign countries, former FBI assistant director for counter-intelligence Frank Figliuzzi said Tuesday on MSNBC that the Justice Department and Smith also likely have all of former president Donald Trump’s phone records, which is very bad news for the failed ex-president.

Figliuzzi began by noting that statements Trump made at the CNN town hall recently were confessions of his actions regarding classified documents.

“But that crucial period after that sobering subpoena is slapped on you is that I have a choice,” Figliuzzi began. “I’ll either comply with the law, or I’m not. And everything he’s done after that has involved non-compliance with the law, and, in fact, thumbing his nose at the law. And as recently as the CNN town hall meeting, he actually said, ‘I took those documents. I had every right to. And if I did show them to somebody, and I can’t remember if I did or not, I had every right to.’ This is defiance that goes towards criminal intention. It is there. And, by the way, if the reports are accurate, this case is all but done.”

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reported today that Smith is nearing the end of his investigation and has completed all of the interviews in the case.

That led host Nicolle Wallace to inquire, “Do we assume that people we maybe haven’t heard about, going in to talk to Jack Smith and his investigators, are part of the fabric of this part of the probe — foreign business dealings and Trump classified documents?” 

“We know Trump doesn’t use email, but he is a prolific user of the phones, right?” explained Figliuzzi. “And so, guaranteed there have been subpoenas for phone carriers for his phone records throughout this period and watching his response to a visit from the head of the National Security Secretary, DOJ, then here come FBI agents, and there’s a subpoena. And you’re watching this, they call it ‘tickling the wire.’ See what responses — who is he calling? Who’s calling each other?”

That, Figliuzzi continued, is how Smith and the DOJ will determine if Trump was involved in espionage.

“So, you can develop sources. So, when there is great confidence that they have the goods on him, it is because they are targeting people who know for a fact what is going on. Now, let’s fast forward and tie that into this subpoena for whether or not the Trump Organization was doing any business with one or more, or seven nations. There is an interesting piece in the Washington Post that actually puts a post on it. And it is last month. If that is true, that is intriguing because it may imply that this is a pro forma routine thing. Let’s make sure there’s no surprises because the defense will say, ‘Look, you have no evidence that committed espionage, right? That he actually disseminated national security information to a foreign country?’ Well, we better look.”

“Maybe from those phone calls, maybe from those from sources, where we think, no, we better look at Saudi, or China, or Turkey. I don’t know. But it would go toward motive,” he concluded. “And it would be explosive if he would have actually shown documents, and what if those documents involved those very countries that are on the list? It’s even more concerning. And now you’re looking at maybe real-life espionage. We don’t know.”