Donald Trump looked to be uncharacteristically fearful in an interview earlier this week that may have exacerbated his legal troubles, a prominent columnist writes.
Tom Nichols writes for The Atlantic that it wasn’t Trump’s “jittery and combative” tone during a two-part interview on Fox News with host Bret Baier that caught his attention. “That’s not unusual,” he wrote.
What caught his attention was the extent to which the former president seemed uneasy on his home turf, giving the impression something wasn’t right with the former president.
"Donald Trump seems, more than anything, to be afraid," Nichols wrote.
Nichols notes that despite Trump’s complaints about the right-wing cable network, “Fox, after all, is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a ‘hostile’ network.”
But it was the former president’s answer to one question in particular, which Nichols believes is likely to give Trump and his legal team heartburn.
Nichols writes that “In a potentially important moment, Baier pressed Trump about why he hadn’t simply returned the boxes of materials as the government demanded.”
“Trump, after his ritual invocation of the Divine Right of Presidential Box Ownership, said that he’d wanted to return them but hadn’t had enough time to go through everything, so he didn’t know what was in them. Bad move: Trump had already gotten his lawyers to certify that he did, in fact, know what was in them — or, more accurately, to certify that nothing classified or sensitive remained. As some legal analysts quickly pointed out, including a former prosecutor named Chris Christie, this all sounds a lot like obstruction of justice.”
