Does
Donald Trump not understand the greatest truism in politics—i.e., that it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup? That screams from the page while reading Thursday’s superseding indictment of Mr. Trump, who now stands accused of trying to delete incriminating Mar-a-Lago security video.
Special counsel Jack Smith charged Mr. Trump last month with unlawfully retaining national-security information, as well as concealing classified files at his Florida club. According to this week’s indictment, the feds subpoenaed Mar-a-Lago’s surveillance footage on June 24, 2022. Within hours, Mr. Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, was planning to fly to the club, while texting its IT director to ask if he was available.
On Saturday, June 25, Mr. Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, a club property manager, “went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the Storage Room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.” On Monday morning, Mr. De Oliveira found the IT director, took him “to a small room known as an ‘audio closet,’” and asked him how long the club’s server kept footage. He then said “that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” the indictment says.
Mr. Trump is entitled to a defense and presumption of innocence, but this is a damaging allegation. Will the Mar-a-Lago IT director take the stand? Prosecutors are presumably telling Messrs. Nauta and De Oliveira, who also face criminal counts, that it would be in their best interests to cooperate and testify to what “the boss” told them.
If Mr. Trump sought to destroy evidence, it undercuts his defense on the document charges. He contends that the Presidential Records Act gives him the right to retain documents from his time in office. But if Mr. Trump believed that, he would have played it straight. If the indictment is right that he hid the files from his own lawyers and tried to wipe the security video to stop anybody from finding out, then he didn’t buy his own defense.
Prudential questions about the wisdom of this prosecution remain. Mr. Trump appears to have kept the files out of pigheadedness, not because he wanted to do something nefarious like sell them to an adversary. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago to recover the documents.
The episode reflects poorly on Mr. Trump. But is this conduct that truly gives President Biden no choice except to ask a jury to jail his leading political opponent in next year’s election? At least Watergate involved a burglary.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has set a precedent that further entangles law enforcement with presidential politics. Meanwhile, Mr. Garland’s department cut a dubious plea deal for President Biden’s son Hunter, and IRS agents have testified under oath about political interference with their investigation. Republicans who complain about two standards of justice have a point. Democrats want to use multiple prosecutions to help Mr. Trump win the GOP nomination while diminishing him for a rematch with Mr. Biden.
Yet Republicans should also be angry at Mr. Trump, who is again the architect of his own destruction. He led the GOP to defeats, many of them driven by his personal grievances, in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Add his Covid performance, the Jan. 6 riot, a $5 million civil jury verdict for sexual abuse, plus now a truly stupid alleged Mar-a-Lago coverup.
Yet Mr. Trump still expects the GOP will save him from his own recklessness by nominating him for the White House a third time. He wants Republican voters, as he does Messrs. Nauta and De Oliveira, to take the fall with him.
Good luck if they do. The best revenge for Mr. Trump’s supporters would be to nominate a Republican who can beat Mr. Biden. That’s the way to restore apolitical justice.
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