Jack's Cliffhangers
The cliffhanger is an underappreciated element of the special counsel's indictments of Donald Trump and his fellow defendants in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. I hear legal experts calling these indictments "speaking indictments," in that they go beyond the minimum requirement of an indictment to recite a list of the charges against the accused. Rather, these so-called speaking indictments lay out in some detail the facts and allegations underlying the case.
Jack Smith and his team have surpassed the standard speaking indictment. They have made something of a literary narrative of the case. But rather than leaving the public with self-contained short stories, each indictment contains at least one cliffhanger: one thread of the story left dangling so that readers wonder what happens next. That is, Smith weaves into his narrative an essential literary tool: the element of suspense.
In the original indictment, prosecutors tell the story of Trump's waving around a classified document in front of staff and people working on a book for Mark Meadows. None of these visitors -- according to the indictment -- had either classified clearances or a need to know the information in the document. (See esp. p. 2 & pp. 14 ff. of the indictment.) At that July 21, 2021 meeting at Trump's Bedminister club, Trump himself told his visitors the document he showed them was "highly confidential" and "secret." He also admitted that the document was classified and that, since he was no longer president*, he did not have the authority to declassify it. What Trump did not say was that Bedminster is not an "authorized location" to keep classified documents, and in fact Trump had no right to take any classified documents out of the White House when he left office.
Yet the prosecutors drop the Bedminster story right there. They don't tell us exactly what the classified document was or who wrote it. They don't tell us whether or not they have the document. And even though they devote several pages to this thread of the narrative, they don't charge Trump with any criminal act related to the incident. That is, they just leave the incident "out there," as if it's nothing more than an indication of how cavalier Trump is in his handling of classified documents.
This seemingly irrelevant sidebar left legal experts and other observers scratching their heads. I don't think many recognized the element of suspense. I suspect the suspense was intentional, even if the intended target audience was not us but Donald Trump. No sooner was the indictment published than Trump made a series of contradictory claims about the Bedminister incident. He first said, "There was no document there. ... That was not a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles." After audio of the taped conversation surfaced in the media, Trump claimed he had 'copies of different plans' in his desk. Finally, his defense morphed into an admission: "I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth. It was bravado... I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents." In other words, Trump's changing story was no help at all. He isn't just an infamous liar so nothing he says can be believed; his final "defense" of this episode was to declare he was lying to his guests.
But it turns out the Bedminster incident, as depicted in the original indictment, was a tease or preview of the superseding indictment. All will be explained in Episode 2. The dangling "loose end" wasn't loose at all. It was a cliffhanger. Tune in next month.
In the superseding indictment, released this past Thursday night, Smith revealed that prosecutors had possession of the Bedminster document (see p. 37, Count 32). More important, prosecutors charged Trump with an additional crime for the Bedminster "presentation," which they assert was "in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 793(e)." That is, the crime Trump committed at Bedminster was hiding in plain sight in the original indictment, but it was neither specified nor charged until Smith released the superseding indictment.
The Bedminister story was not Jack Smith's last cliffhanger. The superseding indictment leaves us with its own cliffhanger, one presented in a form and situation so common to episodic teevee mysteries and thrillers that everyone should recognize it. In formulaic scenes and finale, a subpoena for surveillance tapes threatens to reveal that Trump is still hoarding classified documents. (See pp. 27 ff. of the superseding indictment.) Oh noes! What to do, what to do? Trump and co-defendant Walt Nauta are in Bedminister, a thousand miles from Mar-a-Lago and Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Illinois the following day. Nauta, Trump's body man, is supposed to go to Illinois with Trump, but Trump quickly dispatches Nauta to fly down to Mar-a-Lago instead, with an implied mission to destroy the taped evidence.
Once at Mar-a-Lago, Nauta and new defendant Carlos De Oliveira, a former Mar-a-Lago car valet and maintenance man, now described as a "property manager," skulk through a dark tunnel armed with flashlights to help them find surveillance cameras.
Subsequently, De Oliveira lures "Trump Employee 4" to a secret meeting in a windowless closet. Reporters quickly figured out the mysterious Employee 4 was "Yuscil Taveras, an information technology worker. Taveras oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property." After insisting that the conversation remain private, De Oliveira told Taveras that "the boss" -- that is, Trump -- wanted a surveillance camera server deleted. Taveras was skeptical of the plan, according to prosecutors. He told De Oliveira "that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that." After some unspecified back-and-forth, the conversation ends, at least as far as Smith's narrative goes, with De Oliveira asking, "What are we going to do?"
Oh, cue ominous music. What indeed? That is the question. The superseding indictment leaves us hanging.
But -- unlike the cliffhanger in the original indictment -- this one at least lets us know that the question does not end the story. There is more to come. For one thing, the conversation-in-a-closet did not end the conspiracy among Trump and his co-defendants to destroy evidence that the government had subpoenaed. After De Oliveira's apparently inconclusive meeting with Taveras, Nauta and De Oliveira held two secretive meetings in the bushes of a property that abuts Mar-a-Lago (really!). Between those two clandestine meetings, according to the indictment, De Oliveira visited the IT office. There was a subsequent phone conversation between De Oliveira and Nauta.
We don't know what Nauta and De Oliveira said to each other in those meetings and phone call. We don't know what, if anything, was decided or promised during De Oliveira's visit to the IT office. We don't know if Trump's IT personnel refused to delete the surveillance server or if someone in IT tried and failed to delete the server. We don't know if someone in IT thought s/he had deleted the server but later the government was able to retrieve the video footage. We don't know if the Trump Organization turned over only a portion of the tapes while the co-conspirators managed to get some deleted.
What we do know is that the government did obtain enough surveillance footage to incriminate the defendants: in the first paragraph following the story of the meetings in the bushes, we learn that "In July 2022, the FBI and grand jury obtained and reviewed surveillance video from The Mar-a-Lago Club showing the movement of boxes...."
It seems unlikely that the special counsel will bring another superseding indictment, if only because each new indictment is apt to move back the trial date. Maybe reporters will ferret out the answer to this new cliffhanger, as they have done in other pieces of this story. Or perhaps the trial itself is Episode 3.
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Reader Comments (2)
Marie,
Wow! It’s after midnight when reading your excellent post I stopped to get the popcorn! Thank you again for all your hard work. In the past you mentioned working on a mystery novel,p I hope when your house is correctly built and you are feeling safe and cozy that book gets published. Looking forward to reading anything you write. Best Wishes, Julia
The Gang That Couldn’t Delete Straight
Ya know, it’s a wonder how Trump made any money at all. For such a supposedly stable genius, the guy is an idiot. More to the point, I suppose, he’s been able to live his entire life doing whatever he wanted with few consequences, and even then convincing himself that he’s not the one in the wrong, it’s everyone else.
Oh, he’s a great self-promoter, and he knows a few things about real estate (how to keep certain people from renting your apartments), and he most definitely knows how to sue, to delay, to threaten, to stiff people who do honest work for him, to cheat, and to lie.
If there ever comes a time in the afterlife where someone reads out the deeds of our lives, in a format that allows no weenie-ass excuses, brooks no self-serving denials, and observes no attempts at dissembling or delay, the head shakes, eye rolls, and disgusted facial expressions would be the stuff of legend when it comes time to review the life of this fat, entitled creep.
But I digress.
He’s a crook, yes. But a cheap penny ante one. His mastermind stuff is transparently half-assed, dressed up with the usual gaudy frippery. Real crooks know how to cover their tracks and appreciate the necessity of careful planning. Not this fuckin’ guy. All his life he’s been able to get away with shit, no matter how obviously guilty he is, by yelling and screaming and pounding his tiny fists into the tray on his baby high chair. He’s never had to concern himself that eventually he might run into a Jack Smith who can’t be frightened off, bribed, or otherwise avoided.
The idea of the narrative Smith has been laying out is an excellent approach, something Bob Mueller had no clue about. Jack isn’t going that route. It’s like the difference between watching a 12 part, 22 hour documentary on the mating rituals of the Madagascar Mud Slug and a ripping, fast paced whodunnit with wild characters and snappy dialogue.
The J6 committee got that. You’re telling a story. It has to be both factual and compelling, not dry and dusty: Macbeth, not a medieval passion play…in Latin. Jack Smith needs to be observant of his legal responsibilities but is not forgetting that he’s telling a story. And what a story, a former president* absconding with top secret documents, waving them around, storing them next to his pool, a chump who also tried to overturn a free and fair election getting his phone call demanding illegal action recorded! This story has all the makings of top notch drama. So did the Russian interference/Trump obstruction case, but Bob Mueller turned what should have been a snappy Cole Porter song into a monotone Druidic dirge.
And the subplots are hysterically good. Idiots moving boxes around while foreign spies hobnob with Trump lackeys and hangers-on. Meetings in the bushes. Forgetting about surveillance cameras you installed yourself! It’s like one of those French bedroom farces with slamming doors and cheating husbands hiding under beds and jumping out of windows, landing in the neighbor’s rose bush.
I’m with Julia. Get the popcorn ready for the next episode.