FLAGRANTLY CRIMINAL

OK. I am now officially declaring that my imagination has reached its limits. If I had come up with this as a fictional story for a movie, I can assure you that any studio executive I knew back then would not only have thrown me out of their office for coming up with such crap, they would have called my agent and told him never to send them anything from me again, and would have warned their friends off me. That’s how crazy this is.

Josh Marshall termed the story “flagrantly criminal,” and even that doesn’t really come close to describing things.

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman has a book coming out this October, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Unmaking of America.” If there’s a reporter in America who can cover a topic with that title, she’s the one. The publisher says the bookt traces Trump's early life in New York and "his decades of interactions with prosecutors," then follows him through four years in the White House, and on to his post-presidential life in Palm Beach.

This morning, her agents and publisher released a “tease” of what’s in the book:

While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet, and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper.

Haberman reports Trump has told people that since leaving office, he has remained in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

As the Washington Post reported yesterday, the National Archives and Records Administration has referred Trump’s having removed classified papers and records from the White House and taken them to Mar A Largo to the Department of Justice for investigation of criminal activity.

The Presidential Records Act was passed in the wake of Watergate, to insure that presidents did not remove records of their administrations; the act makes clear that everything produced in an administration is the property of the American people, not the president. While there have been differences of opinion between NARA and previous administrations over what was or was not an “official record,” in the 45 years since the act was passed into law, there has never been a criminal referral for further investigation of a president or anyone in his administration over their treatment of official documents.

In addition to Haberman’s scoop about Trump flushing things, there are the many reports from the staff of him tearing up documents. There is even an unconfirmed story of his having eaten a document; this might well be associated with the flushing, since swallowing something like a document after chewing is pretty difficult, even if it’s been torn up.

Trump is well-known for having never used e-mail, for never signing any document, for never leaving any independent evidence of his participation in any event.

For acting like a mob boss.

As my friend Lucian Truscott has pointed out, what is really frustrating about this news of how Trump treated classified material, is to compare how it’s covered today with how Hillary’s e-mails - the great scandal that sank her candidacy - was covered in 2016. Breathless front page coverage with multiple articles, over in the Nation’s Finest Fishwrap. Then there were the wall-to-wall hearings about her crimes in Benghazi. The articles quoting Trump going after her for her “crimes.”

And all of that - the e-mails, the private server, the Benghazi crimes - were all found to be Big Nothingburgers.

But the story about Trump’s actual crimes, about his “flagrant criminality,” that shows up on page 15 of the Times. Things may get better coverage there now that their star Girl Reporter is on the case with a big book coming out in October.

What is it with the “official press”????

Biden has the best economy in everybody’s forgotten how long - and the coverage is about how people think things are “lacking.”

Biden has the best employment numbers EVER - and the coverage is nothing.

Both of those are the kinds of stories that would have played with 1/4 page headlines on the front page of the Times.

If they’d have been stories about Republican presidents.

Trump gets referred to the DOJ for his crimes regarding the Presidential Records Act - real crimes, real events, and it shows up on Page 15 while the bullshit about Hillary’s e-mails had multiple stories “above the fold.”

OK, I admit that stories about him eating official papers, flushing them down the toilet, tearing then into confetti - those are stories no one has ever written before about an American President.

Which is why they should be the stories “above the fold” on Page 1 - not buried on Page 15.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Haberman works for the Times, I doubt anything she has in her book would make it to Page 5, let alone the front page.

I can’t tell which is more “flagrantly criminal” - the actual stories about Trump or the way the Times covers them.

If Trump returns to office in 2024, the New York Times will finally get its deserved comeuppance when he destroys them.

Unfortunately, he’ll destroy us, too.

Because of the coverage of “all the news that’s fit to print” by the New York Times.

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