Does "Superseding Indictment" Mean That Trump Is Closer To A Prison Sentence Now?

Trump decided to run so he could claim "election interference" when the Justice Department came after him. And now he’s doing just that. On Thursday night, right after the superseding indictment was filed, he was on Fox whining. He wants the Republican Party and his allies in Congress to do something about his plight. Conflating the country with himself— as usual— he claimed that the country “is suffering from DOJ abuse. Hopefully the Republican Party will do something about it… This is prosecutorial misconduct used at a level never seen before. If I weren’t leading Biden by a lot in numerous polls, and wasn’t going to be the Republican nominee, it wouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t be happening.”

By the way, this is from Real Clear Politics, the right-wing polling aggregator:

Extremists in the House want to cut funding for the special counsel’s office, for the FBI, for the Justice Department… They’re all about law and order until law and order is about holding them accountable. Reporting for the NY Times after the release of the indictment, Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush wrote that he tried to destroy the security camera footage the that FBI wanted. Unfortunately, the charges were filed in MAGA judge Aileen Cannon’s court.

Unless Smith is trying to encourage Judge Loose Cannon to further continue the Mar-a-Lago trial so that he can try the DC case for election fraud, he’s wasting his time when time is of the essence. My guess is that it’s next to impossible for Smith to get a conviction with this judge and this jury pool in a trial next May. I’m not saying we’re going to see an acquittal, but I’d bet on a hung jury. I also wonder if Cannon will continue this trial now, and, if she does so, her docket for June-September will probably be full. Unless Smith has video of Trump getting an envelope full of cash from an agent of a hostile foreign government while Trump hands said agent highly classified documents, I don’t see Smith getting a conviction with a jury made up of residents of Highlands, Okeechobee, St. Lucie and Martin counties with a judge who has already been reversed twice and who will likely continue to commit reversible— and irreversible— errors. With a Palm Beach County jury and the chief judge of this district, I’d expect a conviction. Smith has a likely losing hand with Cannon judge and this venue. His focus should be on a different prosecution in a much less prejudiced venue.

Feuer, Haberman and Thrush reported that “the revised indictment added three serious charges against Trump: attempting to ‘alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence’; inducing someone else to do so; and a new count under the Espionage Act related to a classified national security document [the Iran war plan] that he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. The updated indictment… served as a powerful reminder that the documents investigation is ongoing, and could continue to yield additional evidence, new counts and even new defendants.”

Prosecutors under Smith had been investigating De Oliveira for months, concerned, among other things, by his communications with an information technology expert at Mar-a-Lago, Yuscil Taveras, who oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property.

That footage was central to Smith’s investigation into whether Nauta, at Trump’s request, had moved boxes in and out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago to avoid complying with a federal subpoena for all classified documents in the former president’s possession. Many of those movements were caught on the surveillance camera footage.

The revised indictment said that in late June of last year, shortly after the government demanded the surveillance footage as part of its inquiry, Trump called De Oliveira and they spoke for 24 minutes.

Two days later, the indictment said, Nauta and De Oliveira “went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the storage room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”

Few days after that, De Oliveira went to see Taveras, who is identified in the indictment as Trump Employee 4, and took him to a small room known as an “audio closet.” There, the indictment said, the two men had a conversation that was meant to “remain between the two of them.”

It was then that De Oliveira told Taveras that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” the indictment said, referring to the computer server holding the security footage.

Taveras objected and said he did not know how to delete the server and did not think he had the right to do so, the indictment said. At that point, the indictment said, De Oliveira insisted again that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, asking, “What are we going to do?”

Two months later, after the FBI descended on Mar-a-Lago with a search warrant and hauled away about 100 classified documents, people in Trump’s orbit appeared to be concerned about De Oliveira’s loyalties.

“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Nauta as saying to another Trump employee.

In response, the indictment said, that employee told Nauta that De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Trump.” After the conversation, Trump— who during his 2016 presidential campaign often assailed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for deleting material from her email server— called De Oliveira and said that he would get him a lawyer.

The revised indictment also charges De Oliveira with lying to federal investigators. It recounts an exchange in which he repeatedly denied seeing or knowing anything about boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago, even though, the indictment said, he had personally observed and helped move them when they arrived.

… The indictment contains an additional charge related to a classified document— a battle plan related to attacking Iran— that Trump showed, during a meeting at his Bedminster golf club, to two people helping his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows write a book.

The updated indictment provides specific dates during which Trump was in possession of the document— from Jan. 20, 2021, the day he left office, through Jan. 17, 2022, the date Trump turned over 15 boxes of presidential material to the National Archives. The specificity of the dates indicates that prosecutors have the document in question and the indictment describes it as a “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country,” adding it was marked top secret.

The meeting at which Trump showed off the document was captured in an audio recording and Trump can be heard rustling paper and describing the document as “secret” and “sensitive.”

Still, he has tried to suggest that he never had a document in his hand and was simply blustering.

“There was no document,” Trump claimed to the Fox News host Bret Baier in a recent interview. “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to declassify.”

Trump's former attorney, Ty Cobb told CNN the evidence in the documents case is "overwhelming and tight... I think this original indictment was engineered to last a thousand years and now this superseding indictment will last an antiquity. This is such a tight case, the evidence is so overwhelming." I’m guessing there will be an indictment in the January 6 case soon-- today, early next week perhaps-- and it’ll be at least just as big a deal— probably bigger— than the Mar-a-Lago case, superseding indictment and all. I'm also guessing that there's been a political decision made to not charge Trump with treason or insurrection or anything like that even if evidence exists; too traumatic for the magadonians and the whole country. That's a mistake, but who am I to say?