Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump’s Legal Messes

Happy Caturday!!

My Mom and me

I haven’t been around much this week, because my Mother died last Sunday afternoon. She was 98. Even though her death was expected, the loss has hit me pretty hard. She was really my best friend for most of my life. We talked on the phone nearly every day; and after my father died in 2010, she asked me to check in with her more often. We often talked 3 or 4 times in a day. I loved talking politics with her!

For the last several years Mom was at home, I drove out to Indiana and stayed with her for extended times once or twice a year. I’m so glad I did that now, because we had opportunities to talk at length, and she share many memories with me.

My Mother was a very kind, caring, and strong woman. With my father, she raised 5 children. They were married for 63 years. When her children got older, she became very active in politics and community affairs. She was very involved in the League of Women Voters, and served as chapter president. In the 1970s, she was an Indiana delegate for the Equal Rights Amendment. She also volunteered for years in a local program devoted to alleviating poverty.

She was good Mom, and I will miss her terribly.

The latest on Trump’s legal problems

Everyone is waiting with bated breath for the next Trump indictment. When the January 6 grand jury meets on Tuesday, perhaps Trump will be indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and end American democracy. We can only hope that eventually this monster will be stopped. He cannot be permitted to become president again. In the meantime, we got the superseding indictment in the stolen documents case. Dakinikat wrote about it yesterday. Here’s the latest:

Kaitlan Collins and Katelyn Polantz at CNN. ‘Trump Employee 4’ in superseding indictment identified as Yuscil Taveras.

The Mar-a-Lago employee referenced in the superseding indictment adding major accusations against former President Donald Trump and a new co-defendant to the case has been identified by two people close to the investigation as Yuscil Taveras, an information technology worker.

Taveras oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property….

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team had previously heard testimony about odd conversations between Taveras, Walt Nauta and the new co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager, regarding surveillance footage. The grand jury in Washington, before the case was fully relocated to southern Florida, had also heard testimony specifically regarding De Oliveira’s unusual behavior toward the footage, three people told CNN.

By Eva Fialka

Taveras is at the center of the new accusations added to the indictment, including an exchange he had with De Oliveira on June 27, 2022. In that conversation, De Oliveira asked to have a private discussion in an “audio closet” with Taveras, including questioning how long the footage from the security tapes lasted and whether it could be deleted.

When Taveras said “he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” De Oliveira said “the boss” wanted it deleted, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors for months now have circled around the questions of how much their actions day-by-day during the summer of 2022 were prompted by Trump’s direction, leading the criminal inquiry at times to look even into suspicious but still unexplained events like the draining of the pool at the Florida beach club, which caused flooding in an IT room, CNN previously reported.

De Oliveira was involved in the pool incident, two sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. It was not mentioned, however, in the new court filing. Thursday’s indictment signals that prosecutors now believe they have more direct evidence of Trump orchestrating his employees’ efforts to consider tampering with surveillance footage that captured them moving boxes of records the federal government sought.

Graham Kates at CBS News: What to know about Carlos De Oliveira, the latest Trump employee charged in Mar-a-Lago documents indictment.

Carlos De Oliveira on Thursday became the third person charged with federal felonies in relation to alleged efforts by former President Donald Trump to keep classified information after leaving office and impede an investigation. De Oliveira is identified in the indictment as the property manager at Mar-a-Lago and a former valet….

The indictment claims De Oliveira helped move boxes containing classified information for Trump, and requested an employee to delete Mar-a-Lago security camera footage to prevent it from being turned over to a federal grand jury….

The indictment claims that an attorney for Trump’s company received a grand jury subpoena requiring the production of surveillance records, videos and images, on June 24, 2022. Prosecutors claim that the next day, Nauta and De Oliveira went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors and “walked with a flashlight through a tunnel” to a storage room, pointing to surveillance cameras.

The indictment says days later, on June 27, De Oliveira took another Trump employee to a small room known as an “audio closet,” and asked the employee how many days the server retained security footage. The employee said he believed it was about 45 days.

The indictment does not identify the employee, who multiple sources tell CBS News is Mar-a-Lago I.T. department employee Yuscil Taveras.

De Oliveira allegedly told Taveras that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” according to the indictment. Taveras, the indictment says, responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the right to do that.

Vera and Lola, by Alberto Morrocco

De Oliveira is charged with lying to investigators about his actions.

Federal investigators spoke with De Oliveira at his home on Jan. 13 and asked him about the location and movement of the boxes stored at Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors said in the filing. 

On Aug. 8, 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, seizing more than 100 classified documents. The indictment claims that on Aug. 26, Nauta called an unnamed employee and “said words to the effect of, ‘someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,'” referring to De Oliveira. 

In response, the employee said “De Oliveira was loyal and that De Oliveira would not do anything to affect his relationship with Trump,” according to the indictment.

That same day, Trump called De Oliveira and told him he would get De Oliveira an attorney, according to the indictment.

Some analysis of the case by Philip Bump at The Washington Post: The incredibly damaging timeline of the alleged Mar-a-Lago coverup.

When former president Donald Trump was first indicted by a federal grand jury in June, the world got its first peek at the strength of the evidence compiled by special counsel Jack Smith. It was, by all accounts, remarkable, detailing a number of alleged actions by Trump and his aide Walt Nauta that articulated an effort to both retain documents the government had demanded Trump turn over and to keep the government from knowing that’s what was happening….

The original indictment added new details to this series of events, including alleging that Trump had moved boxes out of view of his attorneys before they began their search for documents. After the material that was turned over in early June was collected, Trump also allegedly suggested that maybe any particularly “bad” documents be disposed of.

Prosecutors were aware of the movement of the boxes because they subpoenaed and received surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago. And it’s that subpoena and the response from Trump and his co-defendants that are the stars of the superseding indictment released on Thursday night.

The new indictment claims that Trump wanted Nauta and another employee Carlos De Olivera to delete the surveillance tapes that the government demanded.

As told in the indictment, the story begins on June 3, 2022. That’s the day on which a Justice Department official was handed a sealed folder containing material marked as classified, purportedly all such material that was at Mar-a-Lago. While there, the feds noticed surveillance cameras near the lower-level storage room where, in August, the FBI would find dozens of documents with classification markings. The government sought and obtained a search warrant for footage from the cameras.

Holding the Place, by Deborah Dewitt

A draft of the subpoena was sent to Trump’s attorneys on June 22 while Trump was in Bedminster, N.J., for the summer. (Everything in this timeline, we should note, is alleged in the indictment and, again, unproved.) The following day, Trump had a lengthy conversation with Carlos De Oliveira, a Mar-a-Lago employee who had also allegedly helped Nauta move a number of boxes back into the storage room after the attorney’s search for material responsive to the May subpoena.

On Friday, June 24, the formal subpoena was received by Trump’s team. At about 1:30 p.m., Trump’s attorney told Trump about it. At a quarter to 4 p.m., Nauta was informed that Trump wanted to see him. Later that evening, Nauta, who had been planning to join Trump on a trip to Illinois, suddenly changed his travel plans to head to Florida.

In text messages to others, he claimed that the change was a function of a family emergency. But, in the same time period that he was changing his travel plans, he also reached out to De Oliveira and the head of IT at Mar-a-Lago (whom the New York Times identifies as Yuscil Taveras) to see if they were going to be around over the weekend. After De Oliveira and Nauta spoke for a few minutes by phone, De Oliveira texted the IT staffer.

“Walter call me earl[ier] said it was trying to get in touch with you,” he wrote. “I guess he’s coming down tomorrow I guess needs you for something.” The IT staffer [now known to be Taveras] then texted Nauta to let him know he was available if needed.

Read the rest of this helpful timeline at the WaPo.

Politico reports on another legal loss for Trump: Judge dismisses Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ lawsuit against CNN.

A federal judge late Friday dismissed Donald Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which the former president argued that the cable network’s statements about his false 2020 election fraud claims likened him to Adolf Hitler.

In the lawsuit, Trump’s team argued that CNN writers and television anchors’ use of the phrase the “Big Lie,” in five specific incidents, incited “readers and viewers to hate, contempt, distrust, ridicule, and even fear” him. But U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, who Trump appointed in 2019, reasoned that because all of CNN’s statements were opinion, Trump could not legally sue the network for defamation.

“Being ‘Hitler-like’ is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim,” Singhal wrote in his dismissal. “CNN’s statements while repugnant, were not, as a matter of law, defamatory.”

The phrase “big lie” historically has referred to a propaganda technique so powerful that people who believe in its message could not believe that someone could have distorted it. It has popular origins in German from Adolf Hitler in his memoir, Mein Kampf.

Singhal dismissed his lawsuit with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot file another lawsuit under the same reasoning.

“The Court finds Nazi references in the political discourse (made by whichever ‘side’) to be odious and repugnant. But bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.” Singhal wrote. “CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people. No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference.”

Ingebjørg Støyva, Norwegian artist

From Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng at Rolling Stone: Trump Privately Called His Team’s Election Lies ‘Crazy.’ The Special Counsel Has Questions.

WHILE DONALD TRUMP was publicly whipping his supporters into a frenzy over claims that the 2020 election was “stolen,” he was privately mocking his own allies’ outlandish conspiracy theories as “crazy.”

It’s a contradiction that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office would like to know all about.

According to two sources with knowledge of the situation, federal investigators have questioned multiple witnesses, including some in recent months, about Trump privately suggesting, starting in November 2020, that certain conspiracy theories and “evidence” were nonsensical.

Among these witness accounts are moments of the then-president repeatedly calling Sidney Powell, one of the MAGA lawyers and die-hard Trumpists aiding his effort to stop the transfer of power, “crazy,” and dismissing many of her election-fraud arguments as patently absurd.

This included Powell’s assertions that several foreign nations had secretly helped rig the 2020 election in favor of Biden, manipulating Dominion voting technology in what would amount to one of the greatest international scandals in modern history. None of this was true, and even Trump — according to these witness accounts, and other sources who relayed similar experiences to Rolling Stone — initially sneered at the ridiculousness of it all.

However, that did not stop President Trump from publicly continuing to entertain and encourage Powell’s propaganda for weeks. This led to a now-infamous Dec. 18, 2020, gathering at the White House, where Powell, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and others used these conspiracy theories to try to persuade Trump to essentially declare martial law and federally impound voting equipment so that he could remain in power. (That White House meeting is itself part of a series of gatherings that the special counsel has been probing.)

Non-Trump stories to check out, links only

Reuters: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints. [I have posted this in comments, but wanted to make sure everyone sees it.]

Politico: Musk’s ‘X’ logo atop former Twitter headquarters draws city scrutiny.

Politico: A DeSantis come-from-behind win is looking vanishingly unlikely.

NBC News: Most of Florida work group did not agree with controversial parts of state’s new standards for Black history, members say.

Politico: DeSantis rocked by Black Republican revolt over slavery comments.

The Washington Post: Biden escalates clash with Tuberville over military vacancies.

NBC News: Mass shooting near community event leaves 5 injured in Seattle.