Trump showed 'mob boss' behavior and will be convicted if claims are proven: WaPo reporter
Donald Trump is acting like a "mob boss" around the concealment of his stash of highly classified national defense information, argued Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig on MSNBC Friday.
This comes after special counsel Jack Smith dropped a superseding indictment against the former president and two of his aides, alleging a plot to destroy surveillance footage that caught them in an obstruction of justice scheme.
"That goes to his state of mind," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "If you know how much trouble you are in and if you want servers deleted, you know that you've done something wrong and if you know that you've done something wrong, you don't have the they were — I mean, I-can-declassify-them-by-thinking-them defense. You don't even have that in your delusional imagination. The conduct is so plainly incriminating. It really is, as many of the legal experts have been saying since last August, such a clean case."
"You know, Nicolle, I'm glad you said it the way you did," said Leonnig. "If the government could prove their original finding from November of last year, what they found then, that Donald Trump arranged to move things away from the storage room, as they found on the surveillance tape, and if they could prove that he instructed an aide to do that and then ultimately they found a ton more records that Donald Trump was not complying with a criminal grand jury subpoena for those documents, then their case is — was really clean."
Now, however, she continued, "these two additional pieces that we've learned sequentially from Jack Smith's fairly determined and methodical investigation ... obstruction one, oh, actually, let's just make sure that we don't return some of these and telling aides who know that he asked them do that. And then obstruction two, let's delete the server. And if the government can prove these things — and obviously my interpretation is that they are trying to flip both Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira as key witnesses who are in a lot of trouble if they don't cooperate — if the government can prove these things and can point the finger directly at Donald Trump, this is a case in which, you know, mob bosses are typically behaving this way. Not former presidents. Not even regular people. Regular people, upon receiving a grand jury subpoena, say, oh my goodness, I need to get a lawyer and quickly comply with this. They don't say, let's find a way to hide some of the records and then let's delete tape recordings that would show that some of this stuff was moved around at my direction."
"It was a clean case November 2022 and it's gotten devastating since," Leonnig added. "Again, with my caveat if the government can prove it, and if Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira flip, based on the criminal jeopardy they themselves face, I don't think that there anything else but like 1,000 percent conviction."
Watch the video below or at the link.
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