Trump was on the verge of being off the hook until the DOJ obtained incriminating doc tapes: report

Donald Trump could have walked away unscathed from his squabble with the Department of Justice over sensitive documents he was hoarding at his Mar-a-Lago resort up until the moment investigators received recordings of him boasting about the documents and then sharing them with aides, a report revealed Friday.

According to the Wall Street Journal, officials at the risk-averse DOJ were willing to not pursue charges if the former president had handed the documents over after months of stalling, but the bombshell recordings forced their hand and resulted in special counsel Jack Smith seeking a 37-count indictment.

The Journal's Aruna Viswanatha and Sadie Gurman reported that the DOJ was reluctant to proceed with indicting a former president and there was a hope that an "off-ramp" would spare Attorney General Merrick Garland from pursuing criminal charges.

As they wrote, "Some officials at the time, even with evidence Trump might have obstructed the response to the May 11, 2022, subpoena demanding the production of classified documents, said their main interest in conducting the Mar-a-Lago search was to return any such material to the government’s possession."

The report continued, "Momentum shifted around February of this year, when investigators got hold of an audio recording of a July 21, 2021, meeting at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., where Trump and his aides met with people working on an autobiography of his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows."

The report notes that those recordings were the smoking gun that took a simple settlement off the table, explaining, "At the time of the search and in the ensuing months, investigators had only heard rumors of Trump’s sharing sensitive documents with donors or other political allies, including on his plane, some of the people familiar with the matter said. They hadn’t established whether such claims were credible."

Adding that "authorities appeared at times to give Trump’s team the benefit of the doubt," the Journal report notes, "In bringing the case, Smith appears to be continuing to take a careful approach, charging dozens of counts but deferring to Trump’s legal team in other ways that are unusual, compared with how the Justice Department treats most federal criminal defendants facing similar charges."

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