The only thing worse than a conspiracy to obstruct justice is a conspiracy to obstruct justice committed by criminals who aren’t very good at it. If the allegations in the superseding indictment handed down by a federal jury against former President Donald Trump last week are accurate, he was at the center of a conspiracy to obstruct justice comprised of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
After the FBI observed surveillance cameras located at Mar-a-Lago near where Trump was illegally retaining the classified documents he had illegally pilfered, the Justice Department notified Team Trump that it was subpoenaing the surveillance footage from those cameras.
Trump’s lawyers informed Trump in New Jersey, who promptly summoned loyal aide and co-defendant Walt Nauta for a meeting. Nauta immediately made arrangements to fly to Mar-a-Lago, texting a colleague that he was returning there on a “family emergency,” using a “shushing” emoji.
No joke.
Trump’s property manager at Mar-a-Lago, one newly indicted Carlos De Oliveira, told another Trump employee that Nauta was changing his plans and coming to Mar-a-Lago, but that he should not tell anyone because Nauta wanted it kept secret.
When Nauta arrived, he and De Oliveira made a cloak-and-dagger trip to the surveillance booth. De Oliveira asked how long the server retained the surveillance footage, stating that “the boss” wanted the server deleted. Told that this could not be done, De Oliveira repeated that “the boss” nevertheless wanted it done.
It is of course possible that when De Oliveira insisted that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, he was referring to Bruce Springsteen, but since Springsteen has not played a major role in Trump’s various Espionage Act violations, it is likelier that this was instead a reference to Trump. And that poses a real migraine for Trump’s lawyers, because if Trump didn’t know that he was in illegal possession of classified documents, or if the documents he was hoarding really were just double cheeseburger order forms from the White House mess kept as a memento, there wouldn’t be any need to delete surveillance footage of the documents. Jurors will not need to be Sherlock Holmes to get this.
Put another way, “shushing” emojis and “The boss wants the server deleted” are not where you want to be as a criminal defendant charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Still, Trump’s base remains enthralled by, and Republican leaders remain terrified of, “the boss,” and therein lies the rub of the tipping point on which American democracy hinges.
While Trump remains generally unpopular — a recent Pew survey found that 63% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of him — nearly four out of 10 Americans regard him approvingly — insurrection, obstruction, Espionage Act, falsification of business records, porn stars and all. The 2024 presidential election promises to be what the Battle of the Bulge was to World War II — determinative of whether democracy prevails or something very dark does.
We aren’t the only ones gripped in this battle. In Israel, the present coalition government, led by someone who, like Trump, searches desperately for a get-out-of-jail card, is supported by only half the country. But this has been enough to do grievous damage to Israeli democracy. In Italy, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is an ardent admirer of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, has done his best to undermine democratic norms, assaulting judicial independence and freedom of the press.
“How to combat this authoritarian ascendancy is one of the most pressing matters of our time,” writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat in her book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” Writing recently in The New Republic, Michael Tomasky observed that “fascism is a sensibility more than it is a political program,” noting that it revolved around support for absolute state power, the notion that majority groups are racially superior and peoples’ “complete obeisance” to the would-be dictator.
Whether we call it fascism or we don’t, millions of our countrymen have demonstrated their “complete obeisance” to a crooked autocrat. What that tells us about ourselves isn’t pretty.
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