THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

I guess we should have assumed right from the beginning that Russia Russia Russia was back there somewhere behind Trump's removal of thousands of documents from the White House when he left office. Among them were hundreds of highly classified documents containing some of the nation's most important national security secrets, including, we have learned, at least one document marked Top Secret/ Compartmented Sensitive Information, concerning nuclear weapons.

On Saturday, Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times reported that last year, as the National Archives was fruitlessly seeking the return of a dozen or more boxes of documents and other materials Trump had taken from the White House in January of 2021, Trump discussed with his lawyers trying to make a deal to trade the documents he had illegally taken for "a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims" that he had been wronged by the FBI and the Mueller investigation of his campaign's ties to Russia. "In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida," the Times reported.

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So, what's really going on here? Is the deal Trump tried to make with the National Archives an aha moment, or not? While the Times dismisses it as just another step in Trump's long journey of delay, distraction, and lies as he tried to hang onto "my" documents, Marcy Wheeler does not. If you're not reading Marcy's Emptywheel blog, you're really missing out. You want to talk about somebody who makes connections others don't, who's unafraid to go straight up against whatever conventional wisdom is circulating around Washington, and who isn't afraid to question the reporting of such media power-mavens as Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt, Marcy is it.

To explain why Trump's obsession with the Russia investigation would lead him to attempt to trade his trove of secret documents for whatever records the National Archives held on the Mueller investigation, Marcy goes all the way back to a moment in 2017 on the night Trump was returning from the G-20 Summit in Helsinki and his really, really private meeting with Vladimir Putin, at which no notes were taken and Trump did not even use his own translator, relying instead on Putin's. Trump was on Air Force One when news reached the traveling White House staff that the Times, in a story reported by yes, Haberman and Schmidt, along with Peter Baker, was going to report that a meeting had been held in Trump Tower in June of 2016 between Jared Kushner and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort with at least one known Russian intelligence agent who was offering "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

Trump and Hope Hicks repaired to the presidential office portion of Air Force One to craft a statement explaining away why such a meeting had taken place. The Mueller investigation was already underway. Trump was being hammered daily for his connections with Russia during the campaign. And he had just appeared at a joint press conference in Helsinki alongside the Russian president at which he was asked by a reporter, who do you believe about Russian involvement in the presidential campaign? Your own intelligence agencies, which reported unanimously that Russia had interfered with the campaign, or Vladimir Putin? Trump answered that Putin had denied it "strongly" during their really, really private meeting, and he believed Putin.

So Trump dictated a statement to be read to the Times reporters over the phone from Air Force One explaining that the Trump Tower meeting with several Russian nationals, including the known Russian intelligence agent, had been about "adoptions of Russian children" by Americans, which had been halted by sanctions imposed by President Obama when news came out that the Russians had interfered in the election entirely on behalf of then-candidate Trump.

There was some speculation about the possibility that emails relating to setting up the Trump Tower meeting might come out and that they would be very damaging, and Trump huddled with his aides to deal with that possibility as well.

Marcy Wheeler makes the excellent point that way, way back in July of 2017, Trump was so cozy with Putin that he basically allowed Putin, after his really, really secret meeting with him, to dictate the statement to the press writing off the Trump Tower meeting as being about "adoptions," which Marcy quite properly reads as "sanctions," and recalls that it was sanctions imposed by Obama that were the subject of the infamous phone call between Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn had promised that Trump would lift the sanctions as soon as he took office, and that got Flynn in so much trouble that he lasted something like 17 days as Trump's national security adviser before he was fired for lying to Vice President Pence about the Kislyak conversation. Flynn also lied to the FBI, which got him indicted and convicted after he pleaded guilty. 

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