No. of Recommendations: 14
Trump continued to dig his stolen documents hole deeper, admitting that he obstructed justice and providing yet more evidence for the special counsel to bury him under.
It was....just jarring to watch him talk about the one element of the case that would (in normal circumstances) be the hardest thing for prosecutors to establish: his actual state of mind when committing the acts.
There's a clearly correct response to a reporter asking you why you didn't return the documents: "No comment." Giving public statements while under indictment is a bad idea.
There's a second-best response to a reporter asking you why you didn't return the documents: "I thought we did return all the responsive documents. That's what I told my lawyers to do!" That's the answer that gets you out of jail, if you can keep the government from proving otherwise.
Instead, Trump said that he didn't want to send the boxes back because they contained personal items (like golf shirts and shoes), and he just hadn't gotten around to taking those things out (more than a year after leaving office). Which is certainly causing his defense counsel to tear out their hair. Now the feds have Trump on video, describing his state of mind back when the decisions were made to refrain from returning the boxes, saying that he was aware of the contents of the boxes and that the decision not to return them was a deliberate, knowledgeable choice. He allowed himself to be recorded saying he knew that there were boxes with material that needed to be returned and that he decided that before they could be "sent over" he had to "take all my things out."
Rarely do prosecutors get given such a valuable gift. In a case that will turn almost entirely on the President's knowledge and state of mind during the relevant time frames, he admitted to nearly everything that the prosecutors would have to otherwise demonstrate in order to prove the "willfully" element of the crime.
