Donald Trump brought his legal troubles on himself – Orange County Register

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Donald Trump has chosen William Barr as his second attorney largely because Barr has criticized special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. Barr still agrees with Trump that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt.”

The former attorney general has a notably different take on the federal indictment against Trump that was unsealed this month, which Barr called “very, very damning.” In contrast to many other prominent Republicans, Barr said the outrage was not the accusation but the “reckless behavior” that prompted it.

As Trump claims the 2020 presidential election was rigged, his retention of government records after he leaves the White House gives Republicans a choice. They can risk the wrath of Trump’s supporters by acknowledging the truth, or they can play it safe by embracing his delusions.

Barr has rejected the latter course since December 1, 2020, when he said the Justice Department had not found “anything to corroborate” Trump’s story about systematically corrupt voting machines or any other evidence of “fraud on a measure that could have produced a different outcome in the election.” Around that time, Barr recalled, he repeatedly called Trump “bull.”

Barr also has little patience for Trump’s insistence that he has “absolute right to do whatever I want” with the thousands of presidential records he seized when he left office, which include more than 300 which is marked as classified. “He has no right to those documents,” Barr said on “Face the Nation” this week. “He has no legal basis to keep them.”

Many Republican lawmakers have described the criminal charges related to Trump’s handling of those records as a politically motivated attack on likely 2024 opponent Joe Biden. But as Barr noted, Trump has “created a whole problem for himself” by refusing to turn over the documents.

“The government has been trying for more than a year, quietly and respectfully, to get them back, which is important that they do, and they’ve pulled them in,” Barr said. Trump remained defiant even as he faced a federal subpoena seeking all classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago.

“He didn’t raise any legal arguments,” Barr said. Instead, according to the indictment, “he engaged in a course of fraudulent conduct” aimed at concealing the records covered by the subpoena. “If those allegations are true,” Barr said, Trump’s behavior was “outrageous” and “a clear crime.”

Barr called the evidence supporting the allegations against Trump, which include obstruction of justice and willful retention of national defense information, “overwhelming,” noting that much of it “came from his own lawyers.” Notes from Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, for example, indicate that his client is inclined to oppose the subpoena.

Consistent with that impression, Trump moved the boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before Corcoran searched them for relevant documents. Barr said he also believes Trump lied to the Justice Department by claiming he fully complied with the subpoena, another crime listed in the lawsuit.

Trump said that every document he removed was “automatically declassified” perhaps by a “standing order,” perhaps “by just thinking about it,” perhaps by the very act of deletion. As Barr previously noted, such claims are “highly improbable” and suggest an overzealous attitude toward national security. In any case, they are not relevant under the law dealing with national defense information, a category that can include unclassified material.

Trump also argued that the Presidential Records Act gave him complete discretion to claim the documents as his personal property. The legal theory is “absurd,” Barr said, because “the whole purpose of the law” is to “stop presidents from getting official documents from the White House.”

Trump, who Barr likened to “a defiant 9-year-old,” has balked at legal restrictions on his acquisitive impulses, insisting that no one has any business going through “my boxes.” Barr is clearly correct when he observes that the case against Trump is “all his doing.”

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @JacobSullum.

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