The dumpster fire of the Trump Administration and its aftermath continue to generate firsts in American Presidential history. Firsts that no properly functioning democracy and properly functioning criminal justice system should come near approaching.
The first first? News outlets and the blogosphere commentariat apparently discovered at approximately the same time that Trump's new lawyer lead is a registered foreign agent. Chris Kise, the lawyer Trump hired with a $3 million dollar advanced paid for from Trump's stop-the-steal PAC, began work in January of 2020 handling lobbying and legal work for -- WAIT FOR IT -- the Attorney General of Venezuela under the Maduro regime. The lobbying and legal work was related to -- WAIT FOR IT -- efforts by Venezueala to undo sanctions imposed on Venezuela for a slew of actions between 2014 and 2018 related to human rights abuses and election manipulations within Venezuela. The original story unearthed by news outlets is likely this one:
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/317253-kise-maduro-us-sanctions/Kise has an interesting professional history but it appears Trump's team did no research on Kise, didn't understand the implications of that background or (more likely?) had to ignore it and hire him anyway in the absence of any other lawyers willing to join the team.
Think about the client and possible charges Kise will be defending for a moment. The client is a former President of the United States who is being investigated SIMULTANEOUSLY for two unrelated actions. One involves taking highly classified documents out of approved government facilities and instead housing them in a residential setting in a basement room with a padlocked door. The other involves likely wire fraud and racketeering related to collecting contributions for specific legal work related to election fraud claims in ten to twelve states but ACTUALLY reallocating millions of those dollars to other political purposes and (likely) personal use including fees for your personal defense in these criminal investigations.
And the lawyer selected to lead this defense work
- has registered as a foreign agent for a government quite hostile to the United States and could POSSIBLY see documents with information that might help him in his work FOR a foreign government attempting to THWART policies of the United Sates
- has collected a $3 million dollar retainer from funds involved with the PAC at the heart of one of the pending criminal investigations
But wait a minute. Are we getting ahead of ourselves on thoughts of an actual criminal indictment and trial of a former President? To answer that, we only need to look at the filings submitted by Trump's team to the court over the last two weeks.
On Saturday, September 17, the new Special Master Judge Raymond Dearie issued a written order requiring Trump to provide an explicit statement identifying which documents among the contested set seized via search warrant Trump was arguing needed review by the Special Master. Dearie's rationale was very simple. Trump argued (and Cannon agreed… sigh) that justice / fairness demanded that a Special Master be appointed to look at all documents seized by the FBI and sort them into two buckets PRIOR to the DOJ using ANY of the documents for additional case work so that documents in a bucket of "unclassified" docs can be returned to Trump. Okay team Trump, you tell me explicitly which documents belong in each bucket according to your theory so I can begin reviewing them. Dearie gave Trump until Tuesday September 20 to respond. Trump's team filed their response on Monday September 19.
Dearie's order is a double-edged sword for Trump because
- if Trump DOESN'T list any documents, then winning the argument for a Special Master to review and return documents to Trump that supposedly belong to Trump is pointless since there are no documents to review
- Trump's entire legal argument about whether documents were classified or de-classified is immaterial to the nature of the likely charges because the documents still required confidential handling under explicitly defined security conditions which are not satisfied by a locked basement room in a cheesy golf resort in hurricane alley.
So how did Team Trump respond? After hours on September 19, Trump's team provided the requested written response to Dearie. Analysis of the response in the media focused on these aspects:
- Trump's team REFUSED to provide any written list of documents to the judge as requested
- Trump's team stated it would convey to the court the "time and place" when and where such a list WOULD be provided only once a criminal trial begins
- Details would NOT be provided to the court because doing so would give the DOJ insight into Trump's plan of defense in the criminal trial and this order didn't require Trump to begin disclosing that defense strategy
- Trump's team also failed to provide any affidavits or documents confirming any steps that WERE taken WHILE PRESIDENT to alter the classification of any of the documents
Pretty clever, huh? That must be what Kise and company are thinking right now. We've got the entire court in a catch-22 that will paralyze the entire process. The Special Master cannot sort the documents until we tell him our criteria. We can argue that providing that criteria will unfairly require us to divulge our defense strategy for criminal charges that haven't been filed, increasing the likelihood of being charged. And the DOJ cannot finalize any indictment until they can finish their investigations based on these documents and we've frozen that access courtesy of the Cannon ruling. VOILA! We've succeeded at paralyzing the process so Trump can continue flying around the country living the life of a millionaire. Indefinitely.
Well, not so clever. This September 19 response by Team Trump forgets the information Team Trump has already conveyed in writing in prior filings about their defense strategy. In the week of 9/12, a prior filing by Trump's team stated:
The government’s stance assumes that if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified irrespective of any actions taken during President Trump’s term in office… There is no legitimate contention that the chief executive’s declassification of documents requires approval of bureaucratic components of the executive branch.
In other words, Trump is still clinging to the notion that a President can instantly declassify anything. In reality, Trump himself signed legislation tightening the rules on information classification, processes and approvals required to declassify information and hiking penalties for the very actions he has committed. Most importantly, Trump appears to believe indictments are likely in these cases and is utilizing the tactic he knows best -- DELAY -- because his ever-shuffling team of lawyers has further impaired an already perilous case through weeks of negligent legal work.
This really seems to be the coup de grace in all this Cooterville-class lawyerin'. The kind of lawyerin' one can only get by having a 40 year track record as a business cheat AND an equally long record of not paying your own lawyerin' bills. This entire Special Master process has lacked any legal merit and it is likely there are only two people on the planet who fail to understand that -- Donald Trump and Aileen Cannon. Hopefully Dearie will IMMEDIATELY rule based on Trump's non-response and provide the DOJ the green light to reveiw ALL documents and end this phase of the charade. Maybe Dearie will also conclude that a registered foreign agent has no business in a courtroom that will be addressing issues of national security and get Kise booted off Teeam Trump as well.
This quality of legal counsel does raise a more serious question, though.
Are we really at a point where someone who has held the highest office in the land is so corrupt and untrusted that no competent, ethical lawyer can be found willing to work for them? In this case, I absolutely believe Trump needs to be indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced and actually SERVE jail time. But that won't happen if the legal process keeps getting delayed as those acting as his legal counsel keep getting knocked off the case for their own misconduct, requiring him to start over with new, equally incompetent counsel.
It seems to me we are very near the point where the only way Trump will get competent counsel is to appoint a public defender for him. How's THAT for a Presidential first?
WTH
