…neither you nor I nor anyone else knows what the docs are nor their provenance, here are my thoughts:

1) It is a virtual certainty that any doc in Trump’s possession is a copy of an original, so there likely is no valid claim that the government is missing any information. In that sense, there is no “theft”, and that essentially blows up any legitimate reason to pursue a case like this, leaving only the obvious political reasons.

2) As president, Trump had plenary power to possess and declassify ANYTHING he wanted and could do so simply by saying “that’s declassified” or perhaps by not doing anything other than treating them as unclassified. The burden is on the DoJ to prove that the docs were never declassified. Good luck.

3) It is very easy to classify a document as a personal record. For example, if Trump wrote a note on a copy of a record, that is a personal record. “Personal” in this case does not refer to yoga routines and wedding plans. It refers to a president’s personal records, memoirs, etc., that he is entitled to keep. There is NO HARM in a president doing so. The “personal records” aspect of this case, such as it is, boils down to a dispute between a bureaucrat and a president over the return of a library book whose ownership is in dispute.

4) The DoJ/FBI have already acted corruptly in this case by pursuing an overly broad search warrant from a friendly judge and then seizing a ludicrously over-broad set of materials. It was obviously a fishing expedition. Further, by their own admission, they have leaked to the press (a known felony that they studiously are NOT investigating) and corrupted the filtering process. On top of the Russia Hoax and other anti-Trump scams in prior years, these moves undercut any and all credibility that the DoJ/FBI investigation might otherwise have had.

5) As I mentioned previously, the DoJ/FBI is fighting tooth and nail to prevent anyone from seeing what they took from Trump. That stinks to high heaven and, again, is reminiscent of their tactics during the Russia Collusion Hoax.

All of the above leads me to believe there is no there there.

BUT: Even is there is a there there, the treatment of Hillary Clinton, Andy McCabe, Jim Comey et al. with respect to their irrefutable mishandling of classified information means that under no fair system of justice should Trump be prosecuted for the same offenses for which they were not. Of course, we have no fair system of justice in DC, so I expect a Trump indictment.

[Post edited by Los Angeles Hoo at 09/21/2022 10:53PM]