Gastonia, NC Insulation is what you call it when the referee leaves the field so the game can be honest. Admission is what you call it when the referee changes shirts because nobody believes the old one anymore. Last Friday looked more like the second thing, and the calendar tells you why. Trump announced his … Continue reading Was the appointment of a special counsel on November 18 an insulation of the documents and January 6 files from electoral politics, or an admission that the Department could not be trusted to finish those files in daylight?
Weekly Correspondents’ Forum 2022
Does the New York civil-fraud complaint filed last week against the Trump Organization belong in the same “accountability” story as the federal criminal files, or is it a state-law valuation fight being asked to do national political work?
Myrtle Beach, SC A civil case about how a building was described to a bank is not a cousin of a documents warrant merely because the caption contains the same surname. That is where I start, and last Wednesday's filing makes the point better than any argument I could construct. The complaint is brought under … Continue reading Does the New York civil-fraud complaint filed last week against the Trump Organization belong in the same “accountability” story as the federal criminal files, or is it a state-law valuation fight being asked to do national political work?
Did the August search of Mar-a-Lago — and the way information about it reached the public — strengthen public confidence that no one is above the law, or teach half the country that the law now arrives with a media package?
Myrtle Beach, SC Confidence is what you have when the same tool would be used on a man your side still likes. I want to test that standard against the actual sequence, because the sequence is more damning than the version most people are shouting, and it is damning in a different place than they … Continue reading Did the August search of Mar-a-Lago — and the way information about it reached the public — strengthen public confidence that no one is above the law, or teach half the country that the law now arrives with a media package?
Now that the National Archives has confirmed classified material among the returned boxes and referred the matter to the Justice Department, is that ordinary records enforcement, or the conversion of a Presidential Records Act dispute into a criminal predicate?
Gastonia, NC The Presidential Records Act was written as a retrieval statute, not as a tripwire. That distinction matters because institutions develop habits from the verbs they use. Archives collect. They inventory. They send letters. They argue over ownership, custody, classification, privilege, access, and whether the box on the truck belongs in one building or … Continue reading Now that the National Archives has confirmed classified material among the returned boxes and referred the matter to the Justice Department, is that ordinary records enforcement, or the conversion of a Presidential Records Act dispute into a criminal predicate?
