The indictment of Donald J. Trump, in the first-ever federal criminal case against a former President, which was released on Friday afternoon by the Justice Department, is a holy-shit document. That might not be the proper legal term for it. But, in a world inured to the shocks and outrages generated by Trump, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge the jaw-dropping nature of the charges against him. Revelations start at the top of the forty-four-page filing and keep coming: The former President of the United States retained nuclear secrets and classified war plans for how to respond to a foreign attack. He kept top-secret information about the military capabilities of other countries. He stashed this information in his bathroom. In his bedroom. And even in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom. (There are pictures!) He misled his own lawyer in order to cover up his possession of these documents. He suggested that documents be hidden or destroyed, and blithely lied about their existence when challenged.
Trump is reported to have improperly taken “hundreds” of classified documents. Of the thirty-one documents that Trump is specifically charged with illegally possessing, thirty are described as involving military or intelligence secrets, while the one outlier, a document from October 21, 2018, is related to “communications with a leader of a foreign country.” (The famous Kim Jong Un “love” letters, perhaps?) According to the indictment, this information was so carelessly handled that, one day, Trump’s body man, Walt Nauta, found secrets spilling out onto the floor of a storage room and snapped a photo of the scene. (Nauta has also been indicted in the case, on charges of making false and misleading statements and participating in a conspiracy with Trump to obstruct the investigation.)
The over-all portrait of Trumpworld contained in the indictment is fully consistent with the shambolic operation the former President ran in the White House, in which little appeared to matter except his own whims. Trump himself is depicted as the orchestrator of a conspiracy to keep the F.B.I. from seizing the classified files he wanted to hold on to. But obstacles to his alleged scheme abounded, including one of his lawyers, who testified to the Feds that Trump encouraged him to get rid of compromising material, and even the former First Lady, Melania Trump. She seems to have sent Nauta a text message complaining that “we will NOT have a room” to transport Trump’s boxes of documents on their private plane from Mar-a-Lago to their summer residence in New Jersey. Nauta, we learn in the indictment, replied to this text with a deferential “Good Afternoon Ma’am” and a “Smiley Face Emoji.”
One of the most prominent pieces of evidence cited in the indictment—right there on page 3—appears to have been generated by Trump’s anger over a story I published on July 15, 2021, which reported the concerns of General Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Trump would trigger a military confrontation with Iran in his final weeks in office. In a taped conversation cited in the indictment, Trump showed book advisers to his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, what he claimed was a U.S. military war plan for Iran. He wanted to weaponize the secret information, which he said, apparently incorrectly, had been provided by Milley and which he thought would undercut the general’s version of events. “As President, I could have declassified it,” Trump told a staffer, according to the transcript cited in the indictment. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
At this point, his staffer was reported to have laughed and responded: “Now we have a problem.”
For years, the joke about Trump has been that he says the quiet part out loud. This time, it appears he did so in a way that could end up earning him jail time.
So what to make of the Republican apologists for Trump—which is to say, most Republican elected officials and virtually all the Party’s Presidential candidates—who expressed outrage after initial reports of the charges against the former President surfaced on Thursday evening, without even bothering to wait for the indictment itself to be released? Are they still so sure that this is an example of how the “deep state” has been “weaponized” against their guy? Don’t they care about Donald Trump allegedly having the nation’s nuclear secrets casually stowed away in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom?
“Egg on their faces,” Sarah Matthews, a former Trump White House deputy press secretary, said of her fellow-Republicans who had taken that embarrassing course of action. John Bolton, Trump’s third national-security adviser and now a very public critic, agreed. “The indictment is devastating,” he told a Politico reporter. “Those who defended Trump before the charges were made public, or those who have not yet spoken should very carefully weigh how history will consider their statements.”
It strikes me, though, that, when it comes to Trump’s defenders in the Republican Party, appeals to some sense of historical conscience are far too late to matter. These Republicans have already made history in enabling Trump and the miasma of lies and disinformation that have enveloped his entire eight-year tour in political life. The question that this case against Trump puts before us is a different one: Will the facts, as laid out in such devastating detail, finally stand a chance against the former President—and the Party that has gone along every step of the way on his reckless, destructive run?
Shortly after 3 P.M. on Friday, Jack Smith, the special counsel who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the investigation, gave a brief televised statement. Reading calmly, still very much a cipher in an anonymous dark suit, he made the case that Trump’s “violations of those laws put our country at risk” and that “we have one set of laws in this country—and they apply to everyone.” He touted “the highest ethical standards” that went into the investigation. He took no questions. It lasted all of two minutes.
The indictment, then, would have to speak for itself. To stand up to all Trump’s public hyperventilation, his taped video denunciations of Smith, the predictable all-caps social-media insults, and the ridiculous claim, repeated on Friday afternoon, that “I’m allowed to do all this” and that “there was no crime, except for what the DOJ and FBI have been doing against me for years,” Smith had one pitch and one pitch only: this single extraordinary document—that forty-four-page indictment—would explain it all. “Read it in full,” he urged. He was right. The proper legal term for this is a Latin one: Res ipsa loquitur. ♦
