Donald Trump, indicted on 37 counts, hid the secret documents he took from the White House in toilets, showers and the ballroom of Mar-a-Lago

The Department of Justice charges him with 37 criminal counts related to withholding secret information, obstruction of justice and perjury.

• scandal Trump, indicted for the second time as Republicans close ranks with him
• research A recording of Trump suggests he knew he was breaking the law by taking secret White House documents

Donald Trump has been indicted by the United States Department of Justice for 37 criminal charges related to withholding of secret information, obstruction of justice and false testimony by the classified documents that he illegally took from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago mansion, in Florida. Some documents that he kept, according to the indictment, in the showers, toilets, his bedroom, an office, the basement, and even on the stage of the marching band in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. Trump’s country club which, as the document states, was the scene of more than 150 events, many of them in that ballroom, “in which tens of thousands of people participated.”

Trump also traveled with them to his other country club, Bedminster, in New Jersey, near New York, where he often spends the summer to escape the humid Florida heat, and He showed them to his relatives. Your valet, Waltine Nautawho was in charge of moving the dozens of boxes in which the hundreds of secret documents were, has also been prosecuted, in his case for lying to the authorities.

According to the indictment record, what was in the “hundreds of classified documents” were not exactly White House recipes. Trump took, without having any type of authorization, “information regarding the defending Yet the military capacity of the United States and its allies; to the nuclear program from the United States; to possible vulnerabilities of the United States in the face of a military attack; and plans about possible retaliatory actions against an attack [a EEUU]”, according to the document on its second page.

The former president showed at least two of those documents to third parties in Bedminster. The first time was in July 2021, when he showed “an attack plan that had been prepared for him by the Department of Defense and high command of the Armed Forces” while he was president. A month or two later I showed another person another map of a military operation “considered top secret”.

audio recording

The first of these meetings was recorded on audio, with Trump’s knowledge, since one of those present was preparing a book about his participation in the government of the former president. On both occasions, Trump boasted that the documents were “top secret” and even said that “now I can’t declassify them” [o sea, hacerlos pblicos] which explicitly contradicts his line of defense that he, as the former president, can decide what is secret and what is not on the spot, without having to ask anyone for permission or even having to say it out loud. high. His will, according to Trump, is enough.

The prosecutor’s document borders on swagger when it describes how Trump ordered the documents to be stored in a basement room at Mar-a-Lago that is connected to the pool and located next to the laundry room, wine cellar, and the room where the sheets. Reading that, one might think that, if the entire case is a failure of the US security services, it is also a failure of its rivals, because countries like China, Russia or Iran have never, apparently, found out that together with the laundry of Mar-a-Lago, in cardboard boxes, were hundreds of documents classified as top secret, to which non-US citizens could not have access, and which sometimes contained “information the disclosure of which would cause exceptionally serious harm to the national security” of the United States.

At certain moments, the prosecution seems to be describing a cartoon of Mortadelo and Filemónwith Mar-a-Lago employees exchanging SMS desperate because they could not find a place for the dozens of boxes that were opened and documents scattered, as when one took a photo of a piece of paper whose access is only allowed to members of the five eyes, that is, the espionage alliance formed by the five great Anglo-Saxon powers of the world, the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. there is also SMS from a member of the Trump family – who appears to be his wife, Melania – to Nauta telling him that even if the former president wanted to put the boxes on his private plane – presumably to take them to Bedminster – “There is NO room on the plane” .

Donald Trump knows that Justice goes one way and politics the other. Sometimes the two intersect. But at other times they follow divergent paths. He is a specialist in achieving the latter. And, as his legal problems worsen, his popularity among his party’s voters rises.

The former president and Republican candidate is summoned before a Miami court on Tuesday at 3 in the afternoon, local time (9 at night in Spain), when the charges against him will presumably be read.