Trump Lawyer Evan Corcoran Found 40 Documents In Mar

Sep 02, 2023

The theory that Trump can declassify anything through his magical presidentialing powers is in shreds.

It is genuinely unfortunate for Camp Runamuck In Exile down in Florida that half its crack legal team is leaving while the other half is testifying. This is because, from my vantage point, anyway, the former president* is going to need someone to shut down the trash compactors on the detention level pretty quickly.

Two stories greeted us to start the week and, taken together, they seem to provide a rough outline of what special counsel Jack Smith has been about as regards the events surrounding the Pool Shed Papers which, contrary to what you might have heard earlier around this shebeen, seems now to be a lethal bit of business for the future of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. First, there was this, from the Guardian:

And why is there all this recent focus in this particular area? Because Evan Corcoran, the lawyer who has come in from the cold, has presented his former client with some lovely parting gifts. Alas for them, he presented them to Jack Smith.

Prosecutors love them some paper. Paper doesn't plea bargain. Paper doesn't flee the jurisdiction. Paper is not granted time on an alleged news network so it can entertain a hand-picked audience with its practiced bullshit alibis for possible criminal behavior. Paper just sits there, on the table or in a file cabinet, ticking.

If they are as presented by the Guardian, the notes Corcoran handed over to Smith's team pretty much shred what was left of the theory that the former president* can declassify anything through his magical presidentialing powers, or that he simply was too ignorant to obey the law. Leaving us with the question of why he would do something as boneheaded risky as stash purloined classified material out back next to the grass seed. Enter The New York Times with a very plausible answer, especially in this context -- namely, to turn a buck.

Let us assume that Smith and his people didn't arrive at those seven countries by tossing darts at a map. Suspended between these two stories is the awful possibility that the former president* spent months doing the dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge exercises as regards subpoenas for those classified documents because he found a way to include them in what the Times calls, politely, his "business dealings in foreign countries." That would add not merely an extra coating of grift and slime to the memory of his administration*, but also several more years to his study of federal institutional dining. The barrel has no bottom to scrape.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.

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