Dennis Aftergut, Salon

In May 2022, Hutchinson, a former top aide to Mark Meadows, who was Donald Trump's final White House chief of staff, gave the committee some of its most incriminating testimony against Trump.

But that damning testimony came in Hutchinson's third interview with the committee, only after she did a complete course correction. In two earlier sessions with the committee, she had apparently adhered to the advice of her then-lawyer, Stefan Passantino, that she answer "I don't recall" to virtually every question the Committee asked — even when the truth was otherwise.

Soon after her blockbuster interview in May, she replaced Passantino with new lawyers and gave the committee further interviews in September. It is those interviews that we focus on here.

For anyone not accustomed to reading 195-page court documents, the September transcripts reveal a pattern of conduct that points to what appears to have been a conspiracy to suppress the truth that this key witness ultimately revealed.

Here are some important facts to keep in mind:

Passantino was a former White House ethics lawyer under Trump. Shortly after the Jan. 6 committee's Dec. 22 release of Hutchinson's September testimony, Passantino resigned from his law firm. He has denied wrongdoing; his side of the story is yet to be told.

What made Hutchinson's September testimony so devastating is the picture that emerges from six pieces of her story that, taken together, suggest a well-orchestrated effort to hide the truth from the House committee and thus the American people.

First: According to Hutchinson, it was months into Passantino's representation that he let slip that "Trump World" was the source of his compensation for serving as her attorney. Absent Hutchinson's informed consent, a palpable conflict of interest arises from Trump or his circle pulling the purse strings of the lawyer supposedly representing a key witness in a congressional investigation into Trump's role in disrupting the peaceful transition of power.

That conflict was brought into stark relief by Hutchinson's testimony that, in her very first conversation with Passantino, she had specifically asked him who was paying him. His reply: "[W]e're not telling people where funding is coming from right now."

Second: Hutchinson testified that Passantino made a revealing statement bearing on the early concern she had expressed about whom the person serving as "her" lawyer was actually representing. Later, according to Hutchinson, Passantino advised her: "We just want to focus on protecting the president."

Third: Hutchinson described an especially telling exchange that took place at a crucial break in her first Committee interview: According to Hutchinson, she told Passantino in a panic, "I'm fucked. I just lied," after testifying that she did "not recall" things that she in fact recalled perfectly well. He then sought to reassure her, insisting that she was "doing the right thing," adding, "We're all really proud of you."

Fourth: Over what Hutchinson testifies was her objection, Passantino discussed her committee interviews with his "Trump World" law partners, including Justin Clark, who represented Trump himself. Passantino also said he would be alerting George Terwilliger and John S. Moran, lawyers for Mark Meadows, of the date of her second committee interview.

In short order, Hutchinson described receiving a phone call from Ben Williamson, Meadows' spokesperson, just before her second interview. According to Hutchinson, Williamson said, "Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you're loyal and he knows you'll do the right thing tomorrow and that you're going to protect him and the boss."

Fifth: Hutchinson said that after her third interview with the committee, Passantino recommended that she simply defy the committee's subpoena; he told her she needn't fear prosecution for such defiance, however unlawful. The Justice Department, he reminded her, had just announced that it was declining to prosecute Meadows and Dan Scavino, Trump's former social media director, for flouting the committee's subpoenas.

Her resistance to Trump World's pressure to stay silent distinguishes her from several Trump allies who defied subpoenas.

Six pieces of Cassidy Hutchinson's story, when put together, suggest a well-orchestrated effort to hide the truth from Congress and thus from the American people.

Under federal law, a person can face a 20-year sentence if convicted of witness tampering, the crime of "corruptly persuad[ing]" a witness "to withhold testimony ... from an official proceeding" or attempting to induce a witness to "evade legal process" with the intent to do so.

In addition, witness tampering to cover up responsibility for a prior crime subjects the tamperers to potential additional charges as accessories to the offenses they tried to help hide.

Sixth: According to her September interviews, after Hutchinson told Passantino she was out of work, he and various other Trump allies had dangled a range of financial opportunities in front of her with the apparent purpose of luring her to testify favorably, if she testified at all.

Tellingly, the timing of those offers often coincided with Hutchinson's committee interviews.

Case in point: It was the morning before her first committee interview that Passantino told Hutchinson he wanted to talk to her soon about job possibilities. And it was shortly before her second committee interview that he told her, "[W]e'll find you something in Trump world. ... We're going to get you taken care of."

Hutchinson also described how, the day before that interview, Trump lawyer Justin Clark, Passantino's then-law partner, "sent [her] a text message ... to try to schedule a call [in which] we could talk about job opportunities."

Hutchinson said that between her second and third interviews, she received a text from yet another Trump lawyer, Pam Bondi, telling Hutchinson to "call Matt next week. He has a job for you." The reference was apparently to Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union. Hutchinson quoted Bondi's text as saying that she'd "just had dinner with POTUS" and Schlapp that night.

As if that hadn't been enough, Hutchinson testified that on the morning of her third interview, Passantino told her about two job opportunities he said he would follow up on after that interview.

The upshot of these and other such incidents to which Hutchinson testified in September is the unmistakable appearance of coordinated and carefully timed actions by multiple people meant to keep Hutchinson from speaking honestly to the committee — what the law refers to, when proven, as a conspiracy.

Hutchinson's testimony should be wrapped in the yellow police tape used to protect crime scenes. Without doubt, a prosecutor's scrutiny is needed. No one is above the law.

In 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's final White House chief of staff, courageously played an outsized part in keeping it.

Franklin understood the fragility of democracy. Its survival requires the vigilance not only of an educated citizenry, but especially of those who serve in government. Yet the demands of loyalty and the lure of power are seductive countervailing forces. With any institution, whether a corporation or a presidency, rooting out corruption depends upon individuals who choose morality over loyalty.

In an all-too-familiar story, Hutchinson, like many whistleblowers, faced an agonizing dilemma: choosing between her moral convictions and allegiance to her former White House bosses. She understood the price that choosing morality entailed. As she told the House select committee on the Jan. 6 insurrection, "You know, I'd seen this world ruin people's lives…. I'd seen how vicious they can be…. And I was scared of that."

As if the likelihood of retaliation were not enough, the choice between loyalty and moral responsibility often comes with extreme financial pressure. Hutchinson was out of work when the committee subpoenaed her. She lacked funds to pay a lawyer. She risked dramatically limiting her future career prospects if she stepped out of line.

Then there was the social and emotional pressure of parting company with her professional circle, including many of her friends, and being both politically and personally ostracized. Hutchinson initially accepted free representation from "Trump world," as she called it. In preparation for her committee interview, her lawyer, Stefan Passantino, encouraged her to answer "I don't recall," even when she did recall.

She went along with that plan, at least until her conscience rebelled. At a break in her first interview, she told Passantino in a panic that she had claimed not to recollect things she actually remembered perfectly well. Passantino pressed her to stay the course, telling her in so many words that she wouldn't get caught.

In turmoil, Hutchinson reached out to a Republican lawmaker she trusted who told her she had to live with the "mirror test": Will you be able to live with yourself if you just move on or do you have to stand up and tell the truth?

She then found guidance in the history of Watergate's most important whistleblowers, a former aide in the Nixon White House named Alexander Butterfield. In 1974, he exposed the fact that all of Richard Nixon's Oval Office phone calls and meetings had been recorded. Over a weekend, Hutchinson read Butterfield's book about his experience — not once, but three times. Without his truthful testimony, the American public would never have had the smoking gun that ended Nixon's attempted cover-up and conspiracy against democracy.

Courage can be inspirational, even across generations. Hutchinson realized that, like Butterfield, she had to tell the whole truth. She found a new attorney willing to work pro bono and delivered her bombshell testimony before the committee, which changed the nation's perceptions of Donald Trump, perhaps permanently

The difficult choice that Hutchinson faced has a counterpart in the corporate world, where the promise of potential future prestige, power and financial gain, or even pure financial necessity, motivates many witnesses of wrongdoing to remain silent in a spirit of misguided loyalty. Even so, there are important difference between those who work in the private sector and those who serve in government. Public office is a public trust.

Cassidy Hutchinson found guidance in the history of Watergate's most important whistleblowers, the former Nixon White House aide Alexander Butterfield.

Cassidy Hutchinson may not have been a perfect profile in courage. She was initially evasive with the committee. But whistleblowers are not required to be perfect people. In fact, they are "ordinary people under extraordinary pressure," to quote a line delivered by Al Pacino as "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman in the film "The Insider." Pacino continues: "What the hell do you expect — grace and consistency?"

Thanks to Hutchinson and others, we have a crucial window into Trump world, and it's not a pretty picture. But an educated and committed citizenry can work to address it. Just last week thanks in no small part to activists pushing to protect our democracy against future assaults, Congress adopted the Electoral Count Act Reform Act. It closed loopholes in its 1887 predecessor that Trump sought to exploit to overturn the 2020 election.

Regrettably, this Congress did not adopt other important democracy-preserving measures, including the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act. The incoming House majority will certainly not be supportive such reforms. Its leaders will likely be intent on protecting Trump and attacking their political enemies on every front.

But attempts to undermine our republic can be thwarted if those who care about it remain vigilant. Opposing the anti-democratic efforts of House Republicans over the next two years can help "keep the Republic" until 2024. America will then have the opportunity to elect a Congress willing to enact whistleblower protections and other measures to safeguard our freedom.

Cassidy Hutchinson's courage reminds us never to underestimate each citizen's power to effect positive change. We must follow her lead. Democracy depends upon it.

As sure as the sun rises in the east, on Monday afternoon the House Jan. 6 committee will today refer former President Donald Trump to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. The open questions are: On which charges, and who else will be referred?

Prosecutors and the committee, even as parts of different branches of government, share the mission of strengthening the rule of law. Prosecutors do it by charging and convicting those who violate criminal statutes. The committee's principal task has been to marshal and present evidence that educates the American people about Trump's role as the central actor in the conspiracy to end our democracy.

It has succeeded.

Even as Republicans hammered the issues of inflation and crime during the November midterms, post-election polls showed that 44% of voters ranked democracy as their No. 1 concern.

The committee gets the lion's share of credit for that; its televised hearings captured the country's attention this summer, and shifted the narrative about Trump's involvement and culpability. Trump's multi-pronged efforts to unlawfully stay in power are sure to be front and center at Monday's hearing.

Over at the Justice Department, newly-appointed special counsel Jack Smith will care more about the committee's evidence — expected to be released Wednesday, with its report — than about the referrals themselves.

Smith will be especially interested in new evidence that the committee is likely to present or include in its report. Since its last hearing, the committee has interviewed new witnesses, including some of the Secret Service agents about whom former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified so dramatically in June.

One new witness whose testimony could be highly useful to prosecutors is Robin Vos, Wisconsin's Republican Assembly speaker. More than a year after the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly phoned Vos, asking him to retroactively reverse Biden's 20,000-vote Wisconsin win.

To prove criminal intent, prosecutors can often introduce evidence of similar acts — even later ones — intended to achieve the same unlawful end for which a person is on trial. Trump's attempts to have Wisconsin's election overturned had the same purpose as his infamous Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, seeking to interfere with that state's election results.

Only last week, as the new man on the job, Smith subpoenaed Raffensperger to testify before a grand jury. Trump's phone call to Georgia could easily be central to federal charges against him for conspiracy to defraud the United States of its function of conducting honest elections. According to a Politico report on Friday, that's one of the charges for which the committee will recommend potential indictment.

Trump's infamous phone call to Brad Raffensperger could easily become central to federal charges, most likely of conspiracy to defraud the United States of conducting honest elections.

Hard as it is not to focus on the headline-making criminal referrals, what will matter far more to prosecutors is the committee's mountains of evidence. Smith needs to see the committee's transcripts of depositions, not only for any evidence against Trump that DOJ prosecutors have not yet gathered, but also to weigh the credibility and usability of witnesses who might be called at trial.

Examining witnesses' prior sworn statements helps prosecutors assess their vulnerability on cross-examination. If they have changed their story, for example, juries may disregard their testimony, whatever they may say that inculpates a target.

As for Trump's allies — in particular Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Trump lawyer John Eastman and former DOJ lawyer Jeffrey Clark — again, any referrals for prosecution will be less important to prosecutors than whatever evidence the committee has gathered against them, and what testimony they might offer against Trump if they were to cooperate.

Giuliani, for example, reportedly led the "fake electors" scheme in seven states. The goal was to create alternative slates of Trump electors and then to manufacture purported "disputes" over whose electors were legitimate. Trump and his allies hoped that might provide a basis for Vice President Mike Pence not to certify Biden's election.

Pence refused to play along, but the attempted crime remains.

Only recently has Smith subpoenaed evidence from the seven states' officials who were allegedly involved. The committee, with its considerable head start, is sure to have documents and testimony that Smith has not yet obtained.

The fake-elector plot is important to prosecutors. Not only was it central to Trump's attempted "quiet coup" to overturn the election, but it deployed fraudulent certification documents that purported to have official seals. Phony documents are a clear sign of corruption, likely to lead juries to convict.

Another important issue for the DOJ in deciding whom and how to indict will be the question of how best to try their targets — separately, or all together in a conspiracy. In March, federal Judge David Carter found it "more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress" on Jan. 6, based on evidence the House committee had submitted under seal. Smith will soon have it.

Anyone who has paid attention to this slow-unfolding legal drama cannot help anticipating whom the committee names for criminal investigation. How much that means to the DOJ is an entirely different question. Indictments depend on evidence, and prosecutors should be receiving boatloads of that from the committee later this week.

Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake — who despite her defeat may yet be a Republican vice-presidential contender — has filed a new lawsuit ostensibly aimed at reversing her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Lake appears to be going for a hat trick of courtroom defeats, which remains no match for her idol, former President Donald Trump, who lost more than 60 cases after the 2020 election.

The first of Lake's lawsuits, filed earlier this year, was dismissed in August. It sought to replace Maricopa County's voting machines with paper ballots.

Here's the clincher: In a new order on Dec. 2, federal Judge John Tuchi described the complaint as filled with "false, misleading, and speculative allegations."

Lake and her co-plaintiff, defeated Republican secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, were ordered to pay Maricopa County's court costs for having to defend the frivolous suit. Her lawyers — who apparently included former Harvard Law professor and Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz — were sanctioned with their own fines.

Then came Lake lawsuit No. 2: On election night in November, an Arizona judge rejected a suit that she filed with other Republicans, finding "no evidence that any voter who appeared to vote at Maricopa County polling places was turned away from the polls."

Related

Kari Lake goes out with a whimper: She couldn't galvanize Trump's Jan. 6 army

And now she's back, filing another suit last Friday making the same claim all over again. ABC News called it a "lawsuit riddled with falsehoods." There were rehashed attacks on mail-in ballots, There was plenty of rank speculation — something courts never accept — that signatures initially identified as possible mismatches might have been improperly accepted after review. There were paragraphs recounting discredited 2020 election allegations from a right-wing PAC, We the People AZ Alliance.

And here's a juicy piece of poetic irony about Lake's claims that her voters were disenfranchised. The Democracy Docket website run by Marc Elias, a leading voting rights lawyer, has pointed out that many of the complaints from voters who claim they couldn't cast their ballots arose because of Arizona's HB 2237, the Republican-sponsored bill enacted last May that erected new barriers to the ballot in an apparent effort to suppress the vote.

A political party hoisted, as the saying goes, on its own petard.

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Does Lake truly believe that with her election litigation, the third time's the charm? That's highly doubtful.

She surely knows that courts don't overturn elections where the loser fell short by more than 17,000 votes. In all likelihood, the point isn't to win. It's to keep her face in front of her audience and to dial for dollars.

Her party's de facto leader has taught her well. In today's Republican politics, fiction sells. Lake will flood social media with messages asking for help paying her lawyers. Trump has demonstrated how well that can work to suck in small-donor cash.

She hopes to use the attention and the money to help propel her toward Trump-Lake 2024. Lawsuits are part of her Phoenix Fox 10 TV approach, what one adviser called her instinct to "sensationalize everything."

Here's the disturbing part: Her suit is just the latest in election denialism, rumors of whose demise are greatly exaggerated.

Yes, voters thumped well-known Trump-endorsed candidates in competitive races, including Lake and fellow gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.

But more than 170 election-deniers won, like Ron DeSantis, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. Get ready for a tent revival of denialism in the new MAGA House majority as it ramps up endless Benghazi-style hearings.

It's all part of the run-up to 2024. Trump will dominate the party at least until then because, as the former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan put it in the Dec. 10 Wall Street Journal, "only the voters can crush Mr. Trump."

To keep that from happening, he, Lake and their allies will work overtime. They will subject voters to more and more election lies, including by litigation, amplifying them and trying to sow ever-increasing distrust of the entire electoral process.

And with Elon Musk having doubled down on his apparent strategy to make Twitter a right-wing haven by blasting out conspiracy theories, it may get worse before it gets worse.

Attention must be paid. As Timothy Snyder, the eminent historian of 20th-century totalitarianism, has written, Trumpism threatens our liberty. "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom."

"Post-truth is pre-fascism," he writes.

Trump's call for the "termination" of the Constitution because he was the "rightful winner" in 2020 made the case in a single social media post. He uses court filings the same way.

Lake has jumped into the same swamp. Her suit, like Trump's before her, will get tossed soon enough. But the dollars will flow as if from heaven, thanks to a true-believing audience that never tires, it seems, of being taken.

The devastating photo that went viral last week of the "Top Secret" markings on documents that the FBI found in its court-approved Aug. 8 search of Donald Trump's office speaks a thousand words about a former president's utter carelessness with national security secrets.

The photo was part of a Justice Department court filing on Aug. 30. The documents were apparently found in Trump's personal office drawer, with his passports, and then placed on the floor for photographers.

Trump has already given his response, blaming the FBI for placing the documents on the floor and claiming that they were declassified — which is almost certainly untrue, and largely irrelevant. His point man for the latter claim has been Kash Patel, a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes who has become a key Trump operative.

Patel has been all over the media, claiming that Trump declassified the documents. That purported wave of a magic wand doesn't eliminate the possible harm to the nation from national security secrets in the documents getting into the wrong hands.

Not to mention that in Trump World, reality and Trump-Patel spin-magic have little in common. Here's the reality: As a 2020 federal court of appeals case states, "Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures . . . Because declassification, even by the President, must follow established procedures." Those procedures are highly detailed and limit the president's power to declassify. Neither Trump nor Patel say anything to suggest those procedures have been followed.

In addition, declassifying documents relating to nuclear secrets — documents which the Washington Post has reported were targets of the FBI search — involves a complicated process that Patel doesn't mention.

Perhaps most notably, in his latest legal filing, where it matters if you lie, Trump doesn't even claim to have declassified the documents. If all that weren't enough, declassification doesn't even matter under the Espionage Act, whose probable violation the search warrant alleges. The statute criminalizes possessing documents, whether classified or not, if they "relate to the national defense" and were officially requested to be returned.

Last year, a military officer who knew Patel in the Defense Department told national security columnist David Ignatius that Patel was a threat to lawful government. Indeed, in November 2020, immediately after Trump's election defeat, he named Patel as acting Pentagon chief of staff, meaning that he was strategically placed when the DOD slow-walked the National Guard response to the Capitol attack of Jan. 6.

Two sources also told Ignatius that the Justice Department was investigating Patel's "possible improper disclosure of classified information." Small wonder that he's Trump's point person on the subject.

* * *

Patel has a knack for telling political tall tales. Earlier this year, he tried to monetize his political fables, and his connections to Trump, to indoctrinate young readers, publishing a MAGA polemic disguised as a children's book called "The Plot Against the King."

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It aimed to plant in youthful brains the idea that the FBI investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's coordination with Russia was without merit; in the book, it's presented as the wicked plot of "Hillary Queenton" against good "King Donald."

In the real world, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's 478-page report, released in December 2019, debunked the lie that the FBI lacked a legitimate basis to open an investigation of the Trump campaign. The predicate for beginning the probe was a July 2016 tip from an Australian intelligence official that a Russian operative had offered a Trump campaign volunteer "dirt" on Hilary Clinton.

That crucial fact earned no place in Patel's indoctrination tract for kids Believe it or not, in his book the wizard "Patel" is the one who foils evil Hillary's plot.

Q: How do you know when a book is all about the ego of the writer?
A: When he anoints himself the story's hero.

Not that Patel would care about this, but partisan politics do not belong in young children's books. Shannon Hayes, an upstate New York farmer and mom who homeschooled her kids, has written that kids don't need political literature because "[t]hey naturally understand how to be kind and accepting, until a grown-up teaches them something different."

Patel's book is a model for teaching children something different than kindness. If he tries to explain why the Top Secret documents spirited away from the White House by Donald Trump posed no risk of harm to the nation by being left around unprotected in a Palm Beach resort, expect something different than truth.

By Kate McMullan

Kate McMullan is a New York writer of children’s books and the author of "This Is The Tree We Planted."

By Dennis Aftergut

Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, is currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.

After Monday's FBI search of Donald Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago, Trump blasted out the news of the unprecedented intrusion on a former president's residence. He asserted that it was politically motivated.

But late on Thursday, the Washington Post reported that "sources familiar with the investigation" say that "classified documents relating to nuclear weapons" were among the materials the FBI search was seeking. The Post's sources did not say whether the agents found such materials.

One source, however, told the Post that among the 15 boxes of materials recovered from Mar-a-Lago in January was material that included "signal intelligence," that is, "intercepted electronic communications like emails and phone calls of foreign leaders."

The Post report surely caught Trump's allies off guard, after many had amplified his claims earlier this week. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, for instance, that Garland should preserve all documents relating to the search and clear his calendar for hearings after the midterms if Republicans, as expected, take control of the House.

Sen. Marco Rubio described the warrant-based search as sponsored by "Marxists." After the Post story, it may be awkward watching him wipe that egg off his face.

Republicans had also mounted an unrelenting public pressure campaign to force Garland into a press conference justifying the search. On Thursday, Garland did exactly that, turning the tables on his attackers with the tactical skill and aplomb of Gen. George Patton.

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Garland needed to abide by Justice Department norms, which generally preclude discussing details of an ongoing investigation while still responding to the attacks upon him, the Justice Department and the FBI.

At the same time, Garland was also eager to avoid becoming the next James Comey. As I observed in Salon on Thursday, Comey came under intense public criticism, and rightly so, for acting contrary to Justice Department norms about not revealing details about pending investigations of a candidate — Hillary Clinton, of course — during an election season.

The current attorney general rose masterfully to the challenge on Thursday. He established that the department had proceeded by the book. He recounted that, to get the warrant, the FBI's sworn affidavit had to establish to an independent federal magistrate judge's satisfaction that there was evidence of a crime and that the evidence would be found at Mar-a-Lago.

Even before Thursday evening's Post report, anyone paying attention understood that this was no ordinary search warrant. Intruding on the residence of a former president is no small matter. The magistrate judge authorizing the warrant would have applied the most rigorous review to ensure that there was solid evidence of a crime.

News reporting tells us that previous voluntary requests, followed by a grand jury subpoena, failed to produce the classified documents that the government believed had been improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago. So the DOJ took the next necessary step to protect national security.

At Garland's press conference, he also made clear that the Justice Department had no intention to disclose Monday's search or anything about it, until Trump revealed it himself.

Trump evidently had his own reasons, including a perceived fundraising opportunity, for making the search public and blaring out his grievance as a purported victim of government oppression. Predictably, his congressional allies and his political base rallied to him, which may well have energized his presidential campaign hopes for 2024.

Here is where Garland turned the tables on Trump and seized the high moral ground. Acknowledging the public statements made by a Trump representative about the search, Garland announced on Thursday that the Justice Department had moved in court to unseal the search warrant and allow it to be made public, making clear that he would not have done that but for Trump's public statements.

The attorney general was careful to say nothing more about the investigation than what the public already knew. The warrant and attached materials, should the court allow their release, will do the speaking for him.

Trump is now caught between a rock and a hard place. He is not likely to want the "inventory" of items that the FBI seized on Monday revealed or he would have done it himself; after all, the agents left a copy with his lawyer at Mar-a-Lago. On the other hand, opposing the motion to unseal the warrant and the inventory would add mightily to suspicion that he had indeed improperly kept state secrets and would prefer to keep that hidden.

He has until 3 p.m. on Friday to decide what stance to take in court.

In the meantime, the twice-impeached ex-president has chosen the safe and familiar course: distraction On his Social Truth media site, he posted: "Does anybody really believe that Joe Biden and the White House knew NOTHING about this great embarrassment to our Country?"

Perhaps the only surprise in all this was his failure to include another familiar meme: "But her emails!"