Conservatives assume he would never do anything dangerous or bad with military secrets.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Smith’s indictment leaves alone the question of why Trump so persistently defied government demands. His defenders have filled in this absence by treating the most innocuous explanation as proven correct. But this defense is less certain than its proponents pretend, and more importantly, it hardly provides any basis for getting him off the hook.
As it turns out, Trump did exactly that. “I think he wanted to pick from them. I don’t imagine him wanting to take the boxes,” Trump’s valet, Walter Nauta, wrote in one text message obtained by Special Counsel Jack Smith. The indictment also depicts Trump making a “plucking motion” to his lawyer in relation to the boxes, as if to say, “If there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.
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