If you can’t get enough of the Trump indictment news and need something to hold you over until his first scheduled court appearance on Tuesday, you have come to the right place.
A new grand jury indictment dropped last week, a glorious 49-page document that lists 37 felony counts and details a ton of evidence against former president and current Florida man Donald J. Trump. This was in addition to the 34 business-related felonies he was already indicted on in April in New York, and the election-tampering indictment that might still be coming in Georgia.
But in all the talk the past few days about violating the Espionage Act and putting our justice system to the test, you might have missed some of the more trivial but still compelling sidenotes. If recent history is any indication, Trump Indictment Day only comes around, oh, once every few months, so let’s dig in and enjoy every last drop. First up …
Did Trump seriously show classified material to Kid Rock?
A particularly damning section of the indictment alleges that Trump showed a representative of his political action committee, a.k.a. some Trump-supporting rando who lacked any security clearance, a classified map related to a military operation. This was in late summer of 2021, more than half a year after he involuntarily left office. So according to prosecutors, Trump not only knowingly possessed classified documents, he was waving them around in front of people who definitely shouldn’t have seen them—which he also knew! Trump “told the representative that he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close.”
But to whom was he casually (and allegedly, I guess) leaking intelligence? Eagle-eyed internet sleuths were all over this mystery and quickly made an especially alarming discovery about the possible identity of the recipient.
Wait. This guy?
Yes, apparently, within hours of the indictment being released, a few people noticed a striking similarity with an anecdote that performer and rabid Trump supporter Kid Rock told disgraced former Fox commentator Tucker Carlson in 2021: “We’re looking at maps and s—, and I’m like, ‘Am I supposed to be in on this s—?’ I make dirty records sometimes. ‘What do you think we should do about North Korea?’ I’m like, ‘What? I don’t think I’m qualified to answer this.’”
“Uhhhh,” is right.
Alas, this appears not to be the same person who’s apparently playing a starring role in Trump’s legal troubles. According to Kid Rock’s version, Trump was still in the White House at the time he saw the map that even he knew he probably shouldn’t have seen, while the incident described in the indictment happened well after Trump left office and no longer could legally possess such documents, much less show them around. So the timelines don’t match, and honestly I’m not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. Relieved, probably.
Kid Rock’s story does show a disturbing pattern, though, in how recklessly our former president handled classified info. While he was in office, sure, he could show our nation’s most sensitive secrets to whomever he wanted, up to and including whatever right-wing performing artist happened to be passing through. But yikes. And he was asking him for advice on North Korea??? I’m just glad we’re all still alive.
Was that a reference to the 2002 Best Picture winner?
To many Americans, the hundreds of classified documents that Trump allegedly stole when he left the White House are an alarming security threat. To the staff members who actually had to deal with the logistical issues of storing so many boxes, though, they were more like an inconvenience: cardboard annoyances they didn’t see the point to but had to find room for somewhere at a resort property. And other people annoyed by them were always asking them to move them out of the way. This, apparently, is the incredibly mundane story of how our nation’s secrets ended up stacked in a shower.
Reading the exchanges between staffers about where else they can move the boxes to, you almost feel sympathy for them, before remembering who they chose to work for. Still, if you’ve ever helped a relative with a hoarding problem move houses, you can probably relate.
At one point in these discussions, excerpted in the indictment, one of the underlings casually referred to their burden as “the beautiful mind paper boxes”:
Trump Employee 2:
We can definitely make it work if we move his
papers into the lake room?Trump Employee 1:
There is still a little room in the shower where his
other stuff is. Is it only his papers he cares about?
Theres some other stuff in there that are not papers.
Could that go to storage? Or does he want everything
in there on propertyTrump Employee 2:
Yes – anything that’s not the beautiful mind paper
boxes can definitely go to storage. Want to take a
look at the space and start moving tomorrow AM?
It just so happens that the movie “A Beautiful Mind” came to Amazon Prime recently and I watched it just a few weeks ago, so the reference popped out at me immediately. As a refresher, the movie tells the story of Nobel-winning mathematician John Nash, who had schizophrenia. After briefly doing some decoding work for the CIA, Nash (played by Russell Crowe) loses his connection to reality and believes he is on a top-secret assignment for the Department of Defense looking for hidden messages in newspaper and magazine clippings. As you can imagine, this delusion leads him to accumulate massive amounts of paper.
Weird obsession with piles of papers? Questionable relationship with reality? A mistaken belief that he still works for the government? It definitely seems to fit, and if so, it’s an interesting bit of insight into how the people who work closely around the former president, cleaning up his messes, actually see him.
It’s possible, even probable, as others have pointed out, that the staffers in this conversation were suggesting or joking that Trump has a mental illness like schizophrenia. Before making any armchair diagnoses, though, please consider how unfair that is—unfair, that is, to all the people who manage their mental illnesses without criming uncontrollably, including the one who practically invented game theory.
Department of Justice: BUT HER EMAILS
We all have a favorite page of the indictment by this point, right? That’s a normal thing to do? Anyway, don’t answer that, but mine is Page 9, on which the Department of Justice spends an entire page on what a huge hypocrite Trump is.
As some of you might recall and still experience PTSD symptoms about, Trump ran and won the presidency in part on a platform of document security and chants of “lock her up!”, repeatedly suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information and use of a private email server not only disqualified her from office but were grounds to throw her in prison. Last week’s indictment takes us back to that painful and ridiculous time with a list of public statements Trump made during the 2016 campaign and his time in office, with gems like:
“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified.”
“In my administration I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one is above the law.”
Er, well. He didn’t mean himself, obviously.
And then there’s this from a public statement in 2018 about former CIA Director John Brennan having his security clearance revoked:
The issue of Mr. Brennan’s security clearance raises larger questions about the practice of former officials maintaining access to our Nation’s most sensitive secrets long after their time in Government has ended. Such access is particularly inappropriate when former officials have transitioned into highly partisan positions and seek to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate their political attacks. Any access granted to our Nation’s secrets should be in furtherance of national, not personal, interests.
Again, obviously not talking about himself.
As much as my forehead hurts from banging it against the wall in frustration, this list isn’t being presented to make us cry into our cereal bowls all over again. This is the official document being used to bring him to trial, and that is extremely satisfying. The words he used so effectively against others are now being used to build a foundation for proving 37 felony counts. They show that this defendant knew and understood the seriousness of the alleged offenses.
Here’s hoping he’s right on one thing that he definitely did not mean at the time: No one is above the law.
(featured photo: Universal Pictures)
