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Will Scharf, a former assistant U.S. attorney who has clerked for two federal appellate judges and worked on two Supreme Court confirmations, posted a long Twitter thread outlining six key points on why the case against Trump is so outrageous.

He clarifies the interplay between the Presidential Records Act and the Espionage Act, which the DOJ invoked to make a civil case into a criminal case.  He says that “by breathlessly bandying around classification levels and markings, the Special Counsel is trying to make this case much, much simpler than it is.”  They would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump believed his possession of these documents, which we know he thought of as his PERSONAL RECORDS, would cause injury to the United States or advantage to another nation --- that’s what would make them National Defense Information, or NDI.  They’d have to prove he knew he had NDI and willfully refused to turn it over to an official entitled to receive it.  Also, just because a document is/was classified certainly doesn’t make it NDI.  Overclassification is known to be a huge problem.

There’s much more here in this thread, including the shaky excuse the prosecutors used to violate attorney-client privilege and force Trump’s lawyers to testify about their private conversations – talks that were spun as a criminal conspiracy but could more easily be interpreted as a client simply asking his lawyer about possible ways to proceed. He said if Trump’s attorneys can get that tainted testimony stricken, it would “gut” most of their case.  It’s a must-read for when you have time. 

One thing this newsletter hasn’t covered in detail (but will) is the allegation made by Stanley Woodward, the attorney for Trump aide and co-defendant Walt Nauta, that the DOJ’s Jay Bratt “suggested Woodward’s [pending] judicial application...might be considered more favorably if he and his client cooperated against Trump.”  The writer, Scharf, knows of Woodward as a highly accomplished lawyer and “legal heavyweight” and can’t imagine him making up such a serious charge.  If Bratt did what Woodward says, this is wild prosecutorial misconduct.

We’ve certainly seen that when people are as deranged by Trump-hate as these folks are, it can do terrible things to them.  Instead of behaving professionally, they start acting like Bratts.  And if this weren’t enough, there’s also the shredding of attorney-client privilege, as well as Merrick Garland’s telling choice of the overzealous partisan Jack Smith to prosecute.

https://twitter.com/willscharf/status/1669333170544680960

Congressional Republicans have a lot of questions they want Merrick Garland to answer, but as Sen. John Kennedy pointed out, in the quote of the day:

“Dog the Bounty Hunter couldn’t find the Attorney General right now.”

https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2023/06/15/sen-john-kennedy-uses-perfect-analogy-to-blister-fbi-doj-inaction-on-biden-bribery-allegations-n761884