I DO NOT HAVE MY HAND IN THAT COOKIE JAR!

Today the world's oldest Professional Juvenile Delinquent said that "If the FBI would have asked, I would have given them the material."

Sorry, Lardass, but you got "asked" three times.

In the hours since Trump’s latest criminal caper got upended, there were some interesting and absurd but still noteworthy events overnight. At least for the moment, Trump’s representatives have settled on a story that he had a “standing order” that any and all classified material he took home with him to the White House residence was “deemed” declassified. Which means that, in fact, none of the materials in question are classified and thus none of it matters. This was announced on Fox as an official statement from Trump’s office by John Solomon, the notorious fake news hustler and former Associated Press Trump propagandist (until he was fired) now operating as Trump’s “designated representative” to the National Archives.

What this means is that FPOTUS (No matter what miserable dimbulb Laura Ingraham says, he is not “the President”) and his Republican hostages are in a state of panic over the events of the last 72 hours. No matter what he or they say, there was certainly no such “standing order” that would be any sort of operational authority, since this isn’t the way classification works. Yes, all classification authority does come from the will and authority of the President, and thus a president can declassify anything they want; however, there is an exception for certain nuclear secrets even President’s can’t declassify, which happen to be the kind of documents that were found at Mar A Lardo. Even in the area where he does have the authority to unilaterally declassivy material, he still has to go through certain procedures: the relevant authorities have to be notified and provided opportunity to weigh in on the advisability of so doing; it’s a process t hat can take several months. It’s not something done at the snap of a president’s fingers. There is a controlling court case confirming this point from as recently as 2019, which involved a previous attempt on his part to do this.

Regardless, we should not lose ourselves in the logic of this inane claim; a fake claim of authority wrapped in a demonstrable lie (the standing order).

What is noteworthy is that these claims are coming from someone who is not getting any legal advice. Not bad legal advice. No legal advice. Currently, Trump is represented by two women - an unknown lawyer from New Jersey and a former OANN host who has been corrected on air for her lies at Fox for chrissakes. But this claim of a “standing order” sounds like the panicked claim of a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, improvising whatever comes to mind.

“I do NOT have my hand in the cookie jar. And if I do, it’s because it’s MY cookie jar” doesn’t work any better than it did when he was caught throwing rocks at the toddler in a playpen in the yard next door, that got him sent to the Rich Juvenile Delinquent Academy (aka the NY Military Academy), where he set such a standard for stupidity in disobedience that anyone caught doing stupid shit was known as a “DJT.”

What this means is the real facts of the case are likely worse than they appear.

This doesn’t mean necessarily that the President is in grave legal peril, but it does prove that his actions are simply impossible to defend. Why was he refusing to relinquish material the US government thought so sensitive and secret that they had little choice but to seize them at the first opportunity? Why did he ignore subpeonas?

Trump is also falling back on his usual tactic when he is caught: make threats. There is a report that he had one of the two bimbettes with law licenses from the Cheerios boxes contact Attorney General Garland to say that he had “spoken with people around the country, who are all outraged by what happened” and to ask “How do I calm them?” The implied threat is that he cannot “calm them” and that there will be more events like the Trumpscum who was moron enough to go try and attack the Cincinatti FBI office after learning on YouTube that it is possible to break ballistic glass with a nail gun. His last “truth” posted on Truth Social was “Well, I learned that was wrong...”

After the House Republican leadership made fools of themselves yesterday morning with their threats against the FBI if the “truth” was not produced muy pronto, the subsequent reaction from Republican elected officials is total silence. The world’s dumbest hammerhead Mick, Sean Hannity, was reduced last night to telling his collection of clucks that Trump could run for the presidency from prison and when elected pardon himself.

It’s hard to march without marching orders and Trump is giving Conservatism Inc. very little to go on about what the facts are and what the bases are for defending him.

This afternoon, the NYT’s Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush scooped that a Trump lawyer signed a written statement in June stating that “all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government.”

They went further and reported that this written declaration “was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.” That is fascinating because of the identification of Bratt as “ the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.”

The top guy doesn’t go anywhere to collect anything if it isn’t top-line important. One can assume from this information that Trump was already under investigation by the Grand Jury the DOJ convened in this matter immediately after the retrieval of improperly-taken presidential records back in February.

Since it is now clear that the person who signed that statement was lying, since they just pulled 15 more boxes out of the basement storage since that statement was made back in June, this means that person is subject to prosecution for perjury prosecution. Now we know why one of the statutes cited in the search warrant covered obstruction of justice.

The fact that Trump has been silent on this all day is proof of just how terrified he is. This is not an investigation where he can squirt the usual squid ink to obscure what’s going on and then send reporters scurrying after whatever “shiny object” he can come up with to deflect from the story.

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