Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings

Donald J. Trump, twice impeached while President of the United States, has now been indicted twice since leaving the White House. I never imagined I’d be writing a lead line like that.

Trump has been charged by a federal grand jury sitting in Miami with putting the United States at risk by mishandling nuclear and military secrets after he left office. The indictment contains thirty-eight counts, alleging Trump:

• Retained top-secret documents detailing U.S. nuclear secrets, military vulnerabilities, and plans for retaliating in the event of an attack after he left the White House.
• Left such documents in boxes inside his Mar-a-Lago club’s ballroom, even as large gatherings were held within it.
• Was caught on tape showing secret U.S. battle plans to private citizens, admitting as he did so that the plans had not been declassified.
• Moved boxes of secret documents out of a storage room so his lawyers would not find them when they searched for papers that needed to be returned to the National Archives in compliance with a subpoena.
• Asked an attorney to hide or destroy any “really bad” documents that were in his possession instead of returning them to the government in compliance with the subpoena.

Conviction on any one of these courts could result in a substantial fine and a jail sentence. Trump has now been arrested and arraigned on these criminal charges.

Trump has now been indicted twice; a Manhattan, New York grand jury charged him earlier this year with thirty-four felony counts resulting from actions Trump took during the 2016 campaign which put him in the White House. In announcing that indictment New York Assistant District Attorney Christopher Conroy explained the charges, “The defendant, Donald J. Trump, falsified New York business records in order to conceal an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 presidential election and other violations of election laws.” Specifically, Trump is accused of covering up hush money payments made to the adult actress Stormy Daniels to keep them from becoming public knowledge during the 2016 election in which Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

In a brief statement following release of the federal indictment, special prosecutor Jack Smith urged people to READ the document. I do too. Much as I like telling you what I think in the hopes you will agree, I do not expect you to do so. I expect you to do the work necessary to find the facts and draw your own conclusions. That is why I always try to give you the links you need to find the primary source material I’ve referenced.

I was not surprised to see reports that a crowd of Trump supporters, attending a campaign event he scheduled immediately after the federal indictment was released still support him. Nor was I surprised to see that few of the people in the crowd had read the indictment yet, the text having been released only hours earlier. But I was certainly disappointed, although still not surprised, to hear almost everyone in that crowd state they had no intention of reading the charging document.

That is upsetting. It is indicative of people both lazy and ignorant. If that is what we have become, we may not be worth saving. Democracy is hard. I’ve written about this before. You must do the work for it to succeed.

I’ve run out of excuses for those who won’t do that work. If so many of us are content to have someone else, be it a self-proclaimed messianic figure or a talking head with a television platform make up our minds for us, I fear for the future of this nation.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. A poll taken in April by the University of Chicago for the British newspaper, The Guardian, found that twelve million American adults, 4.4% of the adult population, believe violence is justified to restore Trump to the White House. Is this what you want?

Read the charges. View the evidence. The current outrage coming from Trump and his partisan followers mean little. They ignore the legal issues. His lawyers will have to address the charges in an answer filed with the court. This will most likely come in the form of a motion to dismiss the complaint. I’ll post a link when that happens. Read it. Make up your own mind.

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