Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, slammed former President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents, saying that Trump—who is facing 37 felony charges—has no one to blame but himself.
“He has shown himself, particularly in his post-presidency, to be completely self-centered, completely self-consumed, and doesn’t give a damn about the American people, if what the American people want isn’t best for him,” said Christie.
Christie made these remarks during a CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper on Monday night. Christie is seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for the presidency; during his remarks, he laid into Trump, the frontrunner, as well as other rivals for the nomination—including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who have failed to condemn the actions of the former president.
“He’s angry and he’s vengeful,” Christie said of Trump. “And he said ‘I will be your retribution.’ He wants retribution for himself. I’m convinced that if he goes back to the White House, the next four years will be all about him settling scores.”
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No comments on On that, we agree
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Fewer than 72 hours have passed since the unsealing of the federal indictment against Donald Trump on charges relating to his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to mislead investigators. The revelations in that document inspired pollsters to take the temperature of the Republican electorate, and their findings confirmed Trump critics’ worst suspicions: GOP voters are still yet to rethink their allegiance to the dominant figure in Republican politics.
CBS News/YouGov pollsters found that 76 percent of GOP primary voters surveyed on Friday and Saturday dismissed the indictment as “politically motivated.” While 80 percent of all adults said Trump’s careless stewardship of classified materials represented a “national security risk,” only 38 percent of Republican voters agreed. Sixty-one percent of GOP voters said the news wouldn’t have any impact on their views of Trump, and 80 percent said the former president should still be able to serve in the White House if convicted.
In the same time frame, an ABC News/Ipsos poll produced similar results. Just 38 percent of self-identified Republicans described the charges against Trump as “serious,” compared with 61 percent of the general public and 63 percent of self-identified independents. That survey found that the public’s views on Trump’s fitness for high office remain largely unchanged by the indictment, which is hardly shocking given the recency of the event and the voting public’s hardened views on the candidate.
These results generated spasms of outrage among the GOP’s critics. How, they asked, could Republicans still stand by this man given the gravity of the allegations he is facing? Of course, recent history does indicate that Republican voters’ affinities for Trump are not conditional, and time alone will not suffice to convince the GOP-primary electorate that the revelations in this or any other forthcoming criminal indictments are disqualifying. If the details contained in the indictment are going to bite, Republican officials and the right-leaning media elites GOP voters trust will first have to press the case it makes against Trump.
There would be precedent for that sort of attitudinal shift. A survey of some of the most divisive issues among Republicans suggests that GOP voters’ views are fluid and subject to revision — a condition that is masked by the absolutist bombast so often deployed by recent converts to the emerging orthodoxy. Take, for example, the issue of immigration.
The conventional wisdom that emerged in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection maintained that the GOP would have to soften its opposition to comprehensive immigration reform if it hoped to compete among Hispanic voters. That point of view was lent credence across the spectrum of right-wing influencers, from Sean Hannity’s primetime Fox News Channel program to much of the GOP conference in Congress. Accordingly, by 2014, six-in-ten self-described Republicans supported legislation that would establish legal residency for illegal migrants. All that changed with the rise of Donald Trump and his demonstration in 2016 that a hardline policy toward illegal immigration wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle to electoral success. By 2018, Republican voters indicated in polls that they not only opposed the legalization of the nation’s illegal population but wanted to reduce legal immigration into the U.S. Trump argued the case, and he won the argument.
A similar phenomenon characterized Republican voters’ schizophrenia when it came to American intervention in the conflict in Syria. In April 2013, while Obama was seeking any and every available means to avoid acting on his self-set “red line” for military action against the Assad regime, 56 percent of Republicans supported strikes on Syrian targets. But by late summer of that year, Obama seemed to acquiesce to pressure and handed the issue off to Senate Democrats, who were prepared to authorize those strikes. That was when Republican opinion flipped. On the eve of the most confused speech of Obama’s presidency, in which he made the case for action in Syria while insisting Moscow had saved him from having to act on his convictions, only about 20 percent of Republicans still backed the strikes. In the interim, Republican influencers had turned against the project, and their supporters followed their leads.
Early in his tenure, Donald Trump executed targeted strikes on Syrian facilities in response to a nerve-gas attack against civilians, which 86 percent of Republicans backed. Republicans were caught off guard in December of the following year, when Trump performed an about-face and sought the removal of U.S. forces from western Syria — a decision that prompted the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis. In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 percent of GOP voters endorsed U.S. involvement in the fight against “Islamic extremist groups in Iraq and Syria.” But when Trump flipped, so, too, did his loyalists with access to microphones, and Republican voters followed suit. By January 2019, only 30 percent of Republicans believed it would be the “wrong decision” to pull all U.S. troops from Syria.
More recently, the debate over the proper level of U.S. support for Ukraine’s effort to resist Russia’s war of territorial expansion has followed a similar trajectory. Within the first month of the invasion, Republicans sided with the majority of Americans who believed Joe Biden hadn’t done enough to support Ukraine in advance of the Russian onslaught. Most Republicans joined Democrats and independents in support of a NATO-backed no-fly zone over Ukraine. But a familiar pattern emerged as the loudest voices in Republican politics agitated against U.S. support for Kyiv. By April of this year, majorities of Republican voters and GOP-leaning independents concluded that the war in Europe did not imperil vital U.S. interests and opposed providing material support for Ukraine’s resistance.
None of this is to say that Republican voters are uniquely susceptible to influence; this is an observably bipartisan phenomenon. What it indicates is that these are complex issues that require deep historical knowledge and a background understanding of policy to fully grasp. As we might expect from representative government, voters outsource that work to their representatives and the experts in the world of politics whom they trust.
For now, the indictment has failed to change Republican voters’ affection for Trump. But we can only expect that condition to pertain indefinitely if influential Republicans who have earned the confidence of GOP voters decline to popularize the case made against Trump in this indictment. And perhaps that’s what will happen. After all, Trump’s opponents are hostage to the shadows on the wall, too.
History suggests that Republican voters’ views are not static. They can change provided the right inputs. The real question is what Trump’s rivals for the 2024 nomination will do. If they press the case against him, they’ll stand a chance of winning voters away from his side. If they instead take the path of least resistance, dismissing the significance of the DOJ’s indictment because making the case that Donald Trump jeopardized U.S. national security is just too hard, his odds of being the Republican nominee in 2024 will remain good.
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Ben Shapiro:
President Trump has apparently now been indicted on seven criminal charges in the classified documents case. You’ll recall that this case actually began after it turned out that President Trump had a bunch of documents at Mar-a-Lago and those documents were requested by the National Archives and Records Administration.
The National Archives warned Trump they could escalate the issue to prosecutors or Congress if he continued to refuse to hand over the documents. He had also been warned by former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann that he could face serious legal jeopardy if he did not comply.
After about 15 of those boxes were returned, officials discovered there were hundreds of pages of classified material in the boxes. Federal law enforcement was notified of the discovery, and they came to believe there were more materials that had not been returned, and then the DOJ issued a subpoena seeking additional classified documents.
A few weeks later, the DOJ decided to raid Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s legal team had signed a written statement claiming that all the classified material had been returned. The FBI executed a search warrant on the property and recovered more classified material.
Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump are among the public officials who we know have had classified material in a place they weren’t supposed to. The only one of those four people who had the power to summarily declassify such material was President Trump.
The president can summarily declassify anything. He’s the head of the executive branch. None of the others were able to declassify anything. So that’s number one. Number two: Why exactly was Trump holding these classified materials in the first place?
As it turns out, according to pretty much everybody who has testified in this case, apparently Donald Trump just decided to hold onto the documents simply because he wanted to hold onto the documents. There was no nefarious reason. The likely thing that happened is, he left the White House and thought, Hey, look, it’s a letter. Kim Jong Un signed it. I’m going to bring it.
And he brought it. And that was the end of the story. The National Archives said, “Can we have the letter?” Trump said, “No.”
That’s pretty much the extent of it. Is that a national security threat to the extent that the former president of the United States and the current Republican front runner for the nomination should be indicted on criminal charges?
No. The answer is, no. And the reason the answer is no is because we have the disparate treatment of those other public officials, including most egregiously, Hillary Clinton.
Let’s look at what Hillary Clinton actually did, because it’s relevant in this context. The FBI and DOJ decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her activities surrounding taking home classified documents and loading them onto an unclassified server, a secret private server kept in a bathroom.
She wound up using BleachBit to clean the documents when it became clear she was suspected of holding those documents, and then those classified documents ended up on the very-not-classified computer of a pervert named Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin’s husband. Huma was Hillary’s close aide.
Hillary still did not get prosecuted. It’s hard to think of a looser use of classified material. It’s difficult to think of Donald Trump doing anything that is remotely as sloppy as that.
Trump’s prosecutors are going out of their way to say Donald Trump was willfully and maliciously hiding this material. The reason they are doing this is because if they say he accidentally mishandled classified information, then we are all going to ask the obvious questions: Why isn’t Joe Biden being prosecuted? Why wasn’t Mike Pence prosecuted? Why isn’t Hillary Clinton prosecuted?
This is differential prosecution. Everyone can see this is differential prosecution. Hillary Clinton stored thousands of documents on a private server in her home while she was secretary of state. Many of those documents were classified. Those documents were then bleached.
Announcing why he was not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, James Comey stated, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Comey admitted there was a high likelihood that foreign eyes ended up on classified material because of Hillary Clinton. Is there a high likelihood that materials ended up being seen by the Chinese or Russians because Donald Trump hid this stuff in a closet at Mar-a-Lago? Is that a high likelihood?
Hillary deliberately wiped her server. Now, if you’re talking about covering up obstruction of justice, preventing the knowledge by law enforcement that you are covering up classified material, Hillary Clinton did all that.
There is still an investigation into Joe Biden keeping classified documents around the nation like Hunter Biden leaves illegitimate children. According to NBC News, “The federal investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents shows few signs of an imminent conclusion, even as the probes into former Vice-President Mike Pence and former President Donald Trump have reached or appear to be reaching the end.”
So is Donald Trump being prosecuted on the basis of doing something extraordinarily different from Hillary Clinton? The answer, of course, is no.
This is a malign use of law enforcement. There is no way in hell that they would be doing this if Donald Trump were a Democrat. There’s no way in hell and we all know it. And that’s perverse. It undermines the credibility of law enforcement, the DOJ, and the FBI. These institutions are at low ebb in terms of credibility among Americans.
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This was a good day for the Beatles in 1970 … even though they were breaking up.
Their “Let It Be” album was at number one, as was this single off the album:
Don’t criticize the number one album today in 1980, lest you be condemned for living in “Glass Houses”:
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The Wall Street Journal:
Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, his indictment by President Biden’s Justice Department is a fraught moment for American democracy. For the first time in U.S. history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former President who is also running against the sitting President. This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come.
Special counsel Jack Smith announced the indictment in a brief statement on Friday. But no one should be fooled: This is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s responsibility. Mr. Garland appointed Mr. Smith to provide political cover, but Mr. Garland, who reports to Mr. Biden, has the authority to overrule a special counsel’s recommendation. Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.
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The indictment levels 37 charges against Mr. Trump that are related to his handling of classified documents, including at his Mar-a-Lago club, since he left the White House. Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the ancient and seldom-enforced Espionage Act for the “willful retention of national defense information.”
But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.
This doesn’t fit the spirit or letter of the PRA, which was written by Congress to recognize that such documents had previously been the property of former Presidents. If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense.
The other counts are related to failing to turn over the documents or obstructing the attempts by the Justice Department and FBI to obtain them. One allegation is that during a meeting with a writer and three others, none of whom held security clearances, Mr. Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack’” from the Defense Department. “As president I could have declassified it,” he said on audio tape. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
The feds also say Mr. Trump tried to cover up his classified stash by “suggesting that his attorney hide or destroy documents,” as well as by telling an aide to move boxes to conceal them from his lawyer and the FBI.
As usual, Mr. Trump is his own worst enemy. “This would have gone nowhere,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS recently, “had the President just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”
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That being said, if prosecutors think that this will absolve them of the political implications of their decision to charge Mr. Trump, they fail to understand what they’ve unleashed.
In the court of public opinion, the first question will be about two standards of justice. Mr. Biden had old classified files stored in his Delaware garage next to his sports car. When that news came out, he didn’t sound too apologetic. “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” Mr. Biden said. AG Garland appointed another special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate, but Justice isn’t going to indict Mr. Biden.
As for willful, how about the basement email server that Hillary Clinton used as Secretary of State? FBI director James Comey said in 2016 that she and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” According to him, 113 emails included information that was classified when it was sent or received. Eight were Top Secret. About 2,000 others were later “upclassified” to Confidential. This was the statement Mr. Comey ended by declaring Mrs. Clinton free and clear, since “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
This is the inescapable political context of this week’s indictment. The special counsel could have finished his investigation with a report detailing the extent of Mr. Trump’s recklessness and explained what secrets it could have exposed. Instead the Justice Department has taken a perilous path.
The charges are a destructive intervention into the 2024 election, and the potential trial will hang over the race. They also make it more likely that the election will be a referendum on Mr. Trump, rather than on Mr. Biden’s economy and agenda or a GOP alternative. This may be exactly what Democrats intend with their charges.
Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump. But the indictment might make GOP voters less inclined to provide a democratic verdict on his fitness for a second term. Although the political impact is uncertain, Republicans who are tired of Mr. Trump might rally to his side because they see the prosecution as another unfair Democratic plot to derail him.
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And what about the precedent? If Republicans win next year’s election, and especially if Mr. Trump does, his supporters will demand that the Biden family be next. Even if Mr. Biden is re-elected, political memories are long.
It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken. It didn’t need to be. However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia. The FBI recovered the missing documents when it raided Mar-a-Lago, so presumably there are no more secret attack plans for Mr. Trump to show off.
The greatest irony of the age of Trump is that for all his violating of democratic norms, his frenzied opponents have done and are doing their own considerable damage to democracy.
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An interesting juxtaposition of 45 years for these two songs:
The number six single today in 1948:
Then, the number 17 song today in 1993 by Green Jellÿ (which began life as Green Jellö — and we have the CD to prove it — until the makers of Jell-O objected):
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Today in 1964, one day after the Rolling Stones recorded their “12×5” album in Chicago, Chicago police broke up their news conference. (Perhaps foreshadowing four years later when the Democratic Party came to town?)
The Stones could look back at that and laugh two years later when “Paint It Black” hit number one:
One year later, David Bowie released “Space Oddity” …
… on the same day that this reached number one in Great Britain:
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Today in 1964, the Rolling Stones recorded their “12×5” album at Chess Studios in Chicago:
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Today in 1972, Elvis Presley recorded a live album at Madison Square Garden in New York:
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The number one single today in 1958:
The number one album in the country today in 1971 was Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Ram”:
Today in 1972, Bruce Springsteen signed a record deal with Columbia Records. He celebrated 19 years later by marrying his backup singer, Patti Scialfa.
Birthdays today start with the Wisconsinite to whom every rock guitarist (including Milwaukee and UW–Madison’s own Steve Miller) owes a debt, Les Paul:
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Last week, the Washington Post attacked Nikki Haley for not taking the Confederate flag down at the South Carolina State Capitol.
You will recall that after the tragic 2015 shooting in Charleston, SC, wherein Dylan Roof murdered congregants at the Emanuel AME Church, Nikki Haley led the charge to take down the Confederate flag. The attack was premised on Haley not doing it sooner and, in her first campaign, assuring South Carolinians she would not pursue the issue.
The Washington Post ignored that Republicans, on the campaign trail during Haley’s 2010 gubernatorial bid, accused her of being a whore and a transplant from India. Those were actual allegations against her by her own side. She won.
She won, in part, by assuring South Carolinians that they could take a chance on her and she would not be disruptive but was one of them. It worked. She won. The Post ignores all that context to say Haley could have, had she wanted, taken on the issue in 2010. They ignore that she might not have won if she proved to be a more disrupting force than she already was.
The context matters. The context of the race, the state, etc. matters. The Washington Post never did a story about how Barack Obama campaigned against gay marriage only to push it in office. They never did a story about how he could have pushed harder on the campaign trail in 2008. But they went there with Haley because she is a Republican and they hate her for it.
In Florida, last week, NBC News reporter Jonathan Allen vented that Ron DeSantis refused to take questions from the crowd at an event. In the same tweet, Allen noted that DeSantis instead chose to mingle and visit one-on-one with the audience. In other words, DeSantis answered questions from people, just not the way Allen wanted.
Today, Allen is at it again. He accuses DeSantis of embracing the Florida “swamp” that he claimed he’d transform. Instead, in his latest NBC News rant, Allen claims DeSantis did not reform the culture of politics in Florida but used it to his own advantage.
Allen and NBC News will not tell you that Jonathan Allen, their reporter, had been an employee of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s political operation. He left Politico for the job but eventually went back to Politico where the progressive spin-meisters waved it all away and claimed it was no big deal. Notably, the man who waved it all away for Allen, is John Harris, Politico’s Editor, whose wife was the Executive Director of NARAL before working for a Democrat in Congress.
Nope, no bias at all.
Allen left Politico, went to NBC News, and no one bothers to tell us he worked for Flordia Democrat Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz before turning his pen against Ron DeSantis.
The press really is the enemy of the GOP more and more. They would not put up with these antics from Republicans. By the way, it is worth noting that CNN had Valerie Jarrett’s daughter on the payroll as an anchor, but she too, is at NBC now.
Perhaps it is more NBC News is the enemy. With MSNBC at least, it is becoming the network most likely to hire Democrat partisans and weaponize them against the right behind the veneer of claims of nonpartisanship.
The GOP would be wise to avoid giving NBC a debate or even dealing with NBC journalists at this point. The network is weaponized against them.
So is the media generally and NBC specifically the enemy, or are they just doing their jobs badly?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 