Perhaps no person in modern American political history has built a movement on bluster like Donald Trump has. He throws a bunch of stuff at the wall, and his supporters are invited to pick and choose what they want to latch on to.
But even bluster has its limits — particularly in a court of law. And repeatedly in recent years, the sheer emptiness of that bluster has been implicitly confirmed by Trump’s own lawyers. That’s because, in venues that require proving your claims, they have conspicuously declined to feature Trump’s own arguments for his cause.
We saw yet another example late Tuesday, when the Justice Department filed a response to Trump’s lawsuit seeking a special master to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
For weeks, Trump has been telling anyone who will listen that he declassified those documents, as if that absolves him of any wrongdoing.
The most important things to note about that claim are that: 1) There is still no actual evidence he did this, 2) the laws Trump is being investigated for potentially violating don’t require the documents be classified, and 3) we just found out the subpoena for the documents was for documents with “classification markings,” not necessarily documents that were actually classified. As a photo the government filed Tuesday shows, the documents seized apparently did have classification markings. So even if Trump can somehow plausibly argue that he declassified them, he’s hardly off scot-free.
But beyond that is something...
Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis has condemned as fake a photo circulating online that allegedly depicts him in a “private moment,” warning that anyone claiming the image is authentic will face l...