Con Air Has Landed

     As Watergate taught us, the coverup is always worse than the original crime. Watergate started out with a few people, a conspiracy, as a petty breakin of a hotel room with the purpose of spying on Democrats. When news of it broke just before the 1972 presidential election, it did so with little fanfare. Nixon, after all, won reelection later that year by a landslide.  But when it began to mushroom into something far worse, the conspiracy to hide the evidence, which involved seemingly the entirety of Nixon's administration, including his Chief of Legal Counsel, John Dean, well, we all know how that ended for Nixon.

     I remember living through the seemingly endless drama of Watergate. It completely dominated headlines and lead stories on TV because we, and the media, thought this was the worst thing a president could possibly do.

     We were so innocent.

     Now Trump's swaddled in his tower named after himself, a building, fittingly, occupied by mobsters and other criminals, psyching himself up for his arrest, booking and arraignment tomorrow. It would be easy to dismiss the grand jury's as yet unsealed indictment because, after all, it seems to revolve around a tawdry sex scandal involving Trump paying off Stormy Daniels $130,000 just before the 2016 election to cover up an extramarital affair.

     That alone makes it tawdry, if not inconceivable, that Trump just became the first former Commander in Chief to be criminally indicted over hush money paid to a porn star he was fucking 18 years ago. Hell, paying hush money isn't even a crime.

     However, Trump's reportedly being indicted on 34 counts. Meaning, the hush money payments were just the smoke that attracted the investigators to the actual fire. That fire will surely involve keeping fraudulent business records and even tax fraud. We know Trump had tried to disguise the payments to Michael Cohen as "legal fees" which, if they were itemized as such and he claimed a deduction for them on New York tax forms, makes it tax fraud.

     And, even though tomorrow will be a circus in which Trump will be the ringmaster, there's something else going on, specifically in the Beltway.

     In case you lost your handy-dandy scorecard that helps you keep straight Trump's looming legal troubles, the one in the Beltway is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's.

 

     Just yesterday, the Washington Post published yet another bombshell article about Trump resisting subpoenas from the DOJ to turn over classified documents that he'd essentially stolen from the White House. In fact, according to the Post,

Investigators now suspect, based on witness statements, security camera footage, and other documentary evidence, that boxes including classified material were moved from a Mar-a-Lago storage area after the subpoena was served, and that Trump personally examined at least some of those boxes, these people said. While Trump’s team returned some documents with classified markings in response to the subpoena, a later FBI search found more than 100 additional classified items that had not been turned over. 

     Yes, Donald Trump is that stupid. He was captured on his own time-stamped security footage going through banker's boxes rummaging for classified documents the Justice Department had demanded, after he was subpoenaed. Jack Smith isn't exactly dealing with a Napoleon of crime here.

      Peter Strzok, however, added another dimension of criminality on Nicolle Wallace's show. Strzok mentioned two things that stood out to him and one of them was Trump's reckless waving around of these same classified documents before Mar a Lago members and potential political campaign contributors.

     If Trump was using these classified documents to generate money for a reelection campaign, that alone could open up a whole range of even more serious criminal charges than we'd hitherto suspected, including fraud on a massive scale.

     We know that Trump’s own valet, Walt Nauta, had told investigators that he'd personally moved boxes at Trump's direction, for which Smith's people also has corroborating evidence.

    

     And then there's Molly Michael, who'd followed Trump from the White House to Mar a Lago before leaving last year. Michael's communications, though the contents remain sealed, surely provide the most granular account of the day-to-day activities of Mar a Lago, most likely including Trump's shell games with the National Archives and Department of Justice.

     Again, the coverup is always more serious than the original crime, which, for Trump, is saying something, considering the serious crime that started this ball rolling was the theft of Top Secret and other classified documents, including intelligence assets and their identities and the nuclear secrets of other nations.