XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.atheism

Rapist and accused felon criminal defendant Trump is a risk to society
and
must be taken off the streets as any other criminal rapist scumbag
should.


Lock the criminals up!!




Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents
on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help
him
hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a
Pentagon "plan of attack" and classified map, according to a sweeping
felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former
president's
treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment -- the first federal case against a former president -- cuts to the heart of any president's responsibility to safeguard the government's most valuable secrets.
Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some
cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with
foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

"Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the
safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced," Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said in
his first public statements. "Violations of those laws put our country at risk."

Trump, currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican
presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance
Tuesday
afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of welcome news for the former
president, the judge initially assigned to the case is someone he
appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a
dispute
last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months
announced
Friday that they had resigned from Trump's legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts -- 31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to
alleged
conspiracy, obstruction and false statements -- that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide
who
prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his
direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the
same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case
with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President
Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and
office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump,
sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

"Nobody said I wasn't allowed to look at the personal records that I
brought with me from the White House. There's nothing wrong with that,"
Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington
and
Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts -- as well as Trump's own
aides
-- had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the
one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the
fallout since Trump's attorneys were notified that he was the target of
the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be
brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. A Trump campaign official described the
former president's mood as "defiant" and he is expected to deliver a full-throated rebuke of the filing during a speech before Republican
Party
officials in Georgia Saturday afternoon and will also speak in North
Carolina in the evening

Aides were notably more reserved after the indictment's unsealing as they reckoned with the gravity of the legal charges and the threat they pose
to
Trump beyond the potential short-term political gain.

The document's startling scope and breadth of allegations, including a
reliance on surveillance video and an audio recording, will almost
certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier
New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The documents case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years -- as president and private citizen -- but
had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation
was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign
and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he
lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated
that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a
war
crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead
both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts
to subvert the 2020 election. That investigation remains pending.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that
Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving
office
in January 2021. Even as "tens of thousands of members and guests"
visited
Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trump's presidency and August 2022, when
the
FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a "ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his
bedroom, and a storage room."

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period between January and
March 15, 2021, some of Trump's boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lago's
gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes
stacked
in rows on the ballroom's stage.

Prosecutors allege that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty
to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a
July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held
onto
a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack
on
another country.

"Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this," the indictment
quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could
have declassified the document but "Now I can't, you know, but this is
still a secret," according to the indictment.

Using Trump's own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by
lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal
to return the documents despite more than a year's worth of government
demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to
conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a
subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he
could defy the request and said words to the effect of, "I don't want
anybody looking through my boxes."

"Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?"
one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records,
the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago
storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during
the
search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to
collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and
an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena
had been turned over. That day, even as Trump assured investigators that
he was "an open book," aides loaded several of Trump's boxes onto a plane
bound for Bedminster, the indictment alleges.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional
documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300
classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the personal aides alleged to have transported the
boxes around the complex, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes
and faces charges that he conspired to hide them, according to the
indictment. His lawyer declined to comment.

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