Trump's obsession with the FBI's 'deceiving' photo hints at much deeper insecurities
Donald Trump’s reaction to the FBI’s display of top-secret documents collected from Mar-a-Lago was, characteristically, incredible. He accused the agents of staging the scene, denying that he was the one who “sloppily” threw the documents on the floor. “Wrong! … They dropped them, not me,” he wrote, a not-very-tacit confession that goes against his lawyer’s declaration back in June that all classified documents had been properly returned.
Complaining about the presentation of documents you claimed to have already turned over feels counterproductive. His lawyer’s latest gambit is similarly self-defeating. Team Trump now says that obviously the raid uncovered classified documents. That’s just the nature of presidential ephemera. “This ‘discovery’ was to be fully anticipated given the very nature of presidential records,” they wrote to the Justice Department last week. “Simply put, the notion that presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been cause for alarm.”
Trump’s fillip on this argument is a confused iteration on the “but I declassified them first!” defense. After once again bristling at the aesthetics of the evidence photo, “Terrible the way the FBI, during … threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!”), he takes the agency to task for posting the photo at all: “Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!” Unluckily for the former president, the current classification level of the documents isn’t the issue. What the Justice Department is investigating is whether he knew he had the documents they were asking for. And if he’s certain he declassified them, then he presumably knew he had them.
The technical term for these sorts of legal own goals is “pulling a Nicholson,” a maneuver in which the witness’s ego is larger than the desire to stick to the script. Did Trump order the code red? Damn right, he ordered the code red!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-obsession-with-the-fbi-s-deceiving-photo-hints-at-much-deeper-insecurities/ar-AA11rgNL