Aware he may have committed a crime, Trump chose to cover it up, again

Recently convicted in an election interference and hush money case, felonious Donald Trump is once again caught covering up a crime.

His attorney's notes confirm that Trump knew he may have committed a crime with his document treasure trove. Rather than cooperate with the justice system, apologize, and make excuses, Trump decided to cover it up and tried to get his lawyer involved. This seems like damning evidence, so naturally, Trump's pet judge is considering throwing it out.

The fact that Trump knew he faced criminal prosecution for possessing the top-secret government documents could be used by prosecutors to establish his consciousness of guilt and would paint his efforts to allegedly confound government efforts to retrieve the documents in an even more incriminating light.

In his notes, Corcoran said that Trump "raised a question as to, if we gave them additional documents now, would they, would they, the Department of Justice, come back and say well, why did you withhold them and try to use that as a basis for criminal liability or to make him look bad in the press."

Trump would then say that it might be better to simply tell the government that there were no documents, which itself would be a crime given that there were still boxes full of classified documents still stashed at his Mar-a-Lago resort at the time.
RawStory

The special counsel is also forced to defend their handling of the documents that Trump essentially kept in a rummaged-through pile because Trump's only defense is to complain that everything is against him and he should not be on trial in the first place.

Trump's attorneys have previously argued that because the order of contents in boxes was changed, it impacts their ability to build a defense around when certain classified material was placed in each box, given where it was inside Mar-a-Lago and what documents – including news articles – were beside it.

A photo of a box taken by a filter agent during the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago. Department of Justice

The new filing from Smith's team goes into granular detail about how the search was conducted, the protocols FBI agents followed, and how certain documents were taken out of the boxes and by whom.

The prosecutors highlighted how investigators found boxes with their contents spilled on the floor, which they also illustrated with photos taken by investigators and by one of Trump's co-defendants.

"Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes" Trump argues that the precise order of the contents "was critical to his defense," prosecutors said, ridiculing the argument.
CNN