As I noted in real time, during a hearing on the Trump shooting yesterday, FBI Director Chris Wray suggested that the FBI is not sure whether the former President was hit by a bullet or shrapnel.
I’ve held off on posting about it, because I expect we’ll get further clarification from the FBI. But Josh Marshall and others have been focused closely on it since, which has set off some squirrelness among Trump’s boosters.
Speaker Mike Johnson suggested Wray wasn’t credible — and that it wouldn’t matter anyway if Trump was falsely claiming he “took a bullet for democracy” if, in reality, he had taken shrapnel for fascism.
Johnson said he didn’t find Wray’s testimony credible.
“We’ve all seen the video, we’ve seen the analysis, we’ve heard it from multiple sources in different angles that a bullet went through his ear. I’m not sure it matters that much,” Johnson said.
He also said Wray “was not forthcoming with some of the information that we would expect.”
And then, finally, Ronny Jackson weighed in. First, he screamed that it was irresponsible for the FBI Director to suggest the evidence was not certainy.
More remarkably, he told CBS that, of course it was a bullet, because if it wasn’t, what would have hit him?
If it wasn’t a bullet wound, I ask you: ‘What was it’? Piece of glass? Where’d the glass come from? I’ve been told the teleprompters are completely intact. So what just mysteriously.. a piece of glass just appeared out of nowhere?
This is where things get really weird.
That’s because Ronny Jackson — I believe this was before he had yet seen Trump after the shooting — described that his nephew, who was sitting close to Trump, was injured when “something had grazed and cut his neck.”
Maybe, just maybe, the same kind of thing that hit his nephew also hit Trump, standing just a short distance away?
Again, I’m agnostic and don’t much care which it was. I care that Trump has refused to provide real medical transparency about the incident, and the press corp has — before Wray’s testimony — largely let that slide. If it was a bullet that damaged his ear, there are actually greater ongoing concerns about head injuries.
But this now smells like flopsweat.
Just release the medical records.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Screenshot-2024-07-25-at-6.59.35 PM.png8041178emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-07-25 14:31:512024-07-25 16:49:58Ronny Jackson Memory Holes His Nephew’s Injury
This purported medical update is not the first we’ve heard from Jackson about Donald Trump’s ear. Jackson did several media interviews before this, starting with propagandist Maria Bartiromo, a chat which focused far less on a quasi medical description. On July 16, in an interview with far right podcaster Benny, Jackson claimed the bullet didn’t get close enough to Trump’s head to cause any concussive effect. Sometime in the same period, right wing columnist Byron York spoke to Jackson more informally. Placing himself among that crowd, Jonathan Swan wrote a fawning story from Jackson’s view — confirming that Jackson offered to help Trump “medically or with the press” — mentioning none of the reasons that Jackson’s claims should be approached with skepticism.
So we should assume this “medical report” is about helping Trump with the press as much as it is changing his bandages.
The letter is an excellent test of how well various journalists evaluate credibility of sources — a good proxy for how they treat anonymous sources. You can watch, in real time, whether journalists consider the following before treating a discredited hack like Jackson as a credible source:
Is he in a position to know what he claims?
Is the report internally consistent
Is he otherwise reliable?
For example, according to Jackson’s narrative (and Swan’s report), Jackson was not a witness to the most important detail of the report: what the doctors in Butler, PA determined.
The President was initially treated by the medical staff at Butler Memorial Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania, who did an excellent job of evaluating him and treating his wound. I want to thank them for their outstanding care. They provided a thorough evaluation for additional injuries that included a CT of his head.
Jackson doesn’t know firsthand what their care was like. And Jackson’s reference to possible medical reports, with no substance, should raise questions about why we haven’t heard about the CT results (and why Jackson didn’t mention the CT test when Benny, who remarkably asked a better question than many self-imagined straight journalists, asked him about a concussion).
Crazier still, Jackson sources his knowledge about the bullet trajectory to what was, “reported and witnessed by the entire world, he sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear from a high- powered rifle used by the would be assassin.” Jackson’s description of the wound may well be accurate.
The bullet passed, coming less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear. The bullet track produced a 2 cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear. There was initially significant bleeding, followed by marked swelling of the entire upper ear. The swelling has since resolved, and the wound is beginning to granulate and heal properly. Based on the highly vascular nature of the ear, there is still intermittent bleeding requiring a dressing to be in place. Given the broad and blunt nature of the wound itself, no sutures were required.
But even there, Jackson’s description of the amount of bleeding is second hand (and inconsistent with what videos showed). Swan even described that Jackson had fallen behind his spouse, watching in the next room, as he followed Trump’s speech live. He watched the shooting itself on delay.
Mr. Jackson was in his bedroom in Amarillo, Texas, on Saturday night, packing his bag for the Republican convention. He was watching the Trump rally on his iPad, but he had stopped the livestream a couple of times, so he lagged behind Mr. Trump’s remarks by a couple of minutes. His wife, Jane, was watching the rally on a television in the living room, and she was speaking to someone on the phone. She suddenly called out to him.
“She said, ‘The president just got shot,’” Mr. Jackson recalled.
“And I said, ‘What? No.’”
“She goes, ‘Are you behind?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ And so I fast-forwarded it.”
Having gone an entire week exhibiting little curiosity about Trump’s medical condition, many outlets snapped this up as if it was credible.
WaPo’s Maegan Vazquez offers one of the better mainstream treatments of this. She raises Jackson’s partisan bias, describing Jackson as, “a political ally whose actions as a medical provider have come into question over the years,” in the second paragraph and returns to concerns about Jackson in later paragraphs.
He will have further evaluations, including a comprehensive hearing exam, as needed. He will follow up with his primary care physician, as directed by the doctors that initially evaluated him.
Axios’ Emma Loop, by contrast, basically just cut-and-pasted the one substantive paragraph. The only warning about Jackon’s unreliability was a link to a report on Jackson’s alcohol and personnel abuse, labeled as Axios’ “Go Deeper” category.
That made Loop’s report nearly indistinguishable from the one from an intern that Politico tasked with cutting and pasting the release.
WSJ simply stuck a quote from Jackson at the end of a report on Trump’s Grand Rapids rally, perhaps appropriately sandwiched between the ravings from other Trump groupies. It offered no caution about Jackson’s credibility.
NYT hasn’t covered yesterday’s release at all, perhaps figuring that Swan’s earlier fawning coverage was sufficient.
Perhaps the most important problem with Jackson’s report came from former Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr.
As former President, Trump has available to him the best doctors in the world to evaluate a gunshot wound (and any possible damage to his brain).
According to Jackson, Trump hasn’t even consulted his primary care physician yet, nor has he had his hearing tested.
He will have further evaluations, including a comprehensive hearing exam, as needed. He will follow up with his primary care physician, as directed by the doctors that initially evaluated him.
Rather than having his physician care for this wound, then, Trump had his trusty PR flack do so.
But maybe Trump didn’t need a practicing doctor to care for him. Maybe the wound was so minor Trump needs no day-to-day medical care, he needs only a nurse to change his bandaid.
This certainly looked like a medical report. But what it reported is we still don’t know about results on the tests done in Butler, including the CT scan. And rather than conveying that, Trump has chosen to put his Candy Man on the case.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Screenshot-2024-07-21-at-10.57.44.png1386950emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-07-21 08:25:452024-07-21 10:41:37Since Leaving Butler, Trump Has Foregone the Best Medical Care and Is Withholding CT Scan Results
In her opinion appointing a Special Master in the Trump stolen document case, Judge Aileen Cannon yoked a description of still-sealed information that appears in the privilege review status report to two unrelated mentions about personal effects.
The second factor—whether the movant has an individual interest in and need for the seized property—weighs in favor of entertaining Plaintiff’s requests. According to the Privilege Review Team’s Report, the seized materials include medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information [ECF No. 40-2; see also ECF No. 48 p. 18 (conceding that Plaintiff “may have a property interest in his personal effects”)]. The Government also has acknowledged that it seized some “[p]ersonal effects without evidentiary value” and, by its own estimation, upwards of 500 pages of material potentially subject to attorney-client privilege [ECF No. 48 p. 16; ECF No. 40 p. 2]. [my emphasis]
As I laid out here, this passage was shamelessly dishonest. That’s because she treated a subjunctive description of what the government would do if they found “personal effects without evidentiary value” as a concession that they had found such personal effects (in the government’s response she was mangling, they explained why the passports they had already returned to Trump did have evidentiary value). And she double counted materials: she treated the 520 pages of potentially privileged material as a separate item from the references to “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information,” even though those medical and tax documents were in the potentially privileged bucket.
Nowhere in this otherwise dishonest passage, though, did Aileen Cannon claim that the, “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information” were Trump’s own personal documents.
Even Trump, when he tweeted about this, stopped short of claiming these were all documents he owned (though he did claim they had taken “personal Tax Records”).
Nevertheless Cannon’s dishonest reference, yoked as it is to two unrelated references to personal effects, has led people to believe that the medical and tax records on which Cannon based her entire decision to butt into this matter are the personal possessions of Donald Trump.
There is no evidence that’s the case, and lots of reason to believe it’s not.
That’s true, first of all, because unlike the description of the contents of boxes sent to NARA in January (which were described to include “personal records [and] post-presidential records,” the detailed inventory of boxes taken on August 8 doesn’t include such a description.
To be sure: The FBI did seize personal documents. The government’s motion for a stay — written by people who have not seen the materials that Cannon describes as medical and tax records — acknowledges personal records.
Among other things, the government’s upcoming filing will confirm that it plans to make available to Plaintiff copies of all unclassified documents recovered during the search—both personal records and government records—and that the government will return Plaintiff’s personal items that were not commingled with classified records and thus are of likely diminished evidentiary value.
There are personal records: for example, the FBI seized 1,673 press clippings, with a bunch — dated 1995, 2008, 2015, and 2016 — pre-dating Trump’s Presidency, though five of the boxes with some clippings that pre-date Trump’s presidency include documents marked as classified, including one box (A-15) with 32 Secret and Confidential documents, and another (A-14) with a Top Secret document. But when it discusses returning things, it discusses “items.” Those personal items likely include the 19 pieces of clothing or gifts on the inventory (though some of the gifts, if they’re from foreign entities, belong to the US). They also likely include the 33 books that were seized, with 23 seized in one box that contained no documents marked as classified.
The government may be generously agreeing to return a carton of Donny Jr’s shitty books!
And there will be Trump notes. Some of the notes likely will count as personal records under the Presidential Records Act, which include:
A) diaries, journals, or other personal notes serving as the functional equivalent of a diary or journal which are not prepared or utilized for, or circulated or communicated in the course of, transacting Government business;
(B) materials relating to private political associations, and having no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President; and
(C) materials relating exclusively to the President’s own election to the office of the Presidency; and materials directly relating to the election of a particular individual or individuals to Federal, State, or local office, which have no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.
But some will be presidential records (those may be some of the most interesting fights going forward and it’s the logic Tom Fitton used to push Trump to challenge the seizure of his records). Some of the notes will also be shown to include information otherwise treated as classified.
But the medical and tax records cannot be included among the items referred to here, because Jay Bratt, who wrote the government motion, has not seen the records that include medical and tax records, because they are in the potentially privileged bucket. And among those materials, there’s likely to be fewer such personal records (aside from clippings).
Of those, Item 4 on the inventory, described only as “documents” and elsewhere sourced to desk(s) in Trump’s office, makes up over half the records seized in the potentially privileged bucket (leaving aside clippings). It primarily consists of 357 government documents without classification marks.
Notwithstanding that this set of documents originally included Trump’s passports (which are legally government documents), it makes sense that even if there were other boxes that included the stray personal correspondence, this one did not. That’s because these were items taken out of Trump’s desk, not a box taken with all its contents. This set of documents, of which just a fraction could have since been deemed potentially privileged (because there are only 64 sets of potentially privileged documents), is also the set on which the privilege team would have focused most attention on the day of the search.
The privilege team was there, in Trump’s office, to weed out really obviously sensitive documents.
Plus, there are ready explanations for what kinds of government documents might include, “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information.”
First, as President, Trump had a White House physician. White House physician Ronny Jackson’s records of his ties to Trump would amount to government records. Even the paperwork behind this famously batshit press conference would be government records — and it might explain why Trump proclaimed (in his Tweet) that these records would prove he was a “Perfect Specimen.”
But there are other medical records that Trump might be more likely to stash in his desk drawer, which might also involve lawyers: his COVID diagnosis (and the reckless decision to attend a presidential debate, exposing Joe Biden to the disease), any assumption of Presidential duties by Mike Pence, the infection of numerous people with COVID at the Amy Coney Barrett roll-out, the Secret Service fly-by when Trump returned to the White House, and the decision to seek FDA approval for his access to Regeneron. The records relating to Trump’s bout with COVID by itself could fill a box. And they’re the kind of records that he would — indeed, already has — fought hard to keep from public dissemination.
Similarly, there are known documents that generated reams of government records pertaining to, “correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information.” Two involve the various efforts to obtain Trump’s tax returns from his accounting firm, Mazars, and extended efforts to investigate Trump Organization’s violation of the emoluments clause with Trump International Hotel.
This OLC memo ruling that the Treasury Department should blow off the House Ways and Means Committee request for Trump’s tax returns relates to taxes. This DOJ amicus brief weighing in on the same fight is a government document about taxes and accounting information. All correspondence generating the documents, too, would relate to taxes and accounting information. All would be government documents. Lawyers would have been involved in all parts of the process. All are the kinds of records Trump might stash in his desk drawer and refuse to turn over.
Similarly, this IG Report describes how the General Services Administration ignored how the Emoluments Clause should impact concerns about management of the Old Post Office. The Report itself references both lease (that is, accounting) information and redacted discussions among GSA and other lawyers. It discusses inadequate efforts after the inauguration to shield Trump from management of the hotel, including several discussions of lawyers for Trump Org and his spawn. It’s a government document. It — and all the legal correspondence and lease information it references — would become government documents. It’s another example of the kind of thing that would be a government record addressing accounting records that nevertheless might trigger privilege concerns.
I’m not saying these are the records at issue. I’m saying there’s a long list of known squabbles that would 1) consist of government records 2) involve tons of lawyering 3) would be the kind of thing Trump would want to hoard, and 4) would fit the low standard of potentially privileged as described by the filter lawyers.
There’s one more reason — besides her false treatment of a subjunctive consideration as a concession and her double counting — to suspect that Cannon created a deliberate misunderstanding that these were documents belonging to the former President: The emphasis with which filter attorney Anthony Lacosta focus on her unilateral treatment of still-sealed information in their motion to unseal their status report. The motion describes two ways in which details from the still-sealed filter team report were made public: First, after asking permission to do so and getting the assent of Trump lawyer Jim Trusty, filter attorney Benjamin Hawk described the filter process. Then, without unsealing the report, Cannon’s several references to the still-sealed report in her own opinion. With two of those references (page 15 and footnote 13 on the same page), Cannon described investigative agents finding something that might be privileged and turning it over immediately to the filter team.
To begin, the Government’s argument assumes that the Privilege Review Team’s initial screening for potentially privileged material was sufficient, yet there is evidence from which to call that premise into question here. See In re Sealed Search Warrant & Application for a Warrant by Tel. or Other Reliable Elec. Means, 11 F.4th at 1249–51; see also Abbell, 914 F. Supp. at 520 (appointing a special master even after the government’s taint attorney already had reviewed the seized material). As reflected in the Privilege Review Team’s Report, the Investigative Team already has been exposed to potentially privileged material. Without delving into specifics, the Privilege Review Team’s Report references at least two instances in which members of the Investigative Team were exposed to material that was then delivered to the Privilege Review Team and, following another review, designated as potentially privileged material [ECF No. 40 p. 6]. Those instances alone, even if entirely inadvertent, yield questions about the adequacy of the filter review process.13
13 In explaining these incidents at the hearing, counsel from the Privilege Review Team characterized them as examples of the filter process working. The Court is not so sure. These instances certainly are demonstrative of integrity on the part of the Investigative Team members who returned the potentially privileged material. But they also indicate that, on more than one occasion, the Privilege Review Team’s initial screening failed to identify potentially privileged material. The Government’s other explanation—that these instances were the result of adopting an over-inclusive view of potentially privileged material out of an abundance of caution—does not satisfy the Court either. Even accepting the Government’s untested premise, the use of a broad standard for potentially privileged material does not explain how qualifying material ended up in the hands of the Investigative Team. Perhaps most concerning, the Filter Review Team’s Report does not indicate that any steps were taken after these instances of exposure to wall off the two tainted members of the Investigation Team [see ECF No. 40]. In sum, without drawing inferences, there is a basis on this record to question how materials passed through the screening process, further underscoring the importance of procedural safeguards and an additional layer of review. See, e.g., In re Grand Jury Subpoenas, 454 F.3d 511, 523 (6th Cir. 2006) (“In United States v. Noriega, 764 F. Supp. 1480 (S.D. Fla. 1991), for instance, the government’s taint team missed a document obviously protected by attorney-client privilege, by turning over tapes of attorney-client conversations to members of the investigating team. This Noriega incident points to an obvious flaw in the taint team procedure: the government’s fox is left in charge of the appellants’ henhouse, and may err by neglect or malice, as well as by honest differences of opinion.”).
As Hawk explained (and she ignored) in the hearing, one of these instances involved nothing more than seeing the name of a law firm. The second he struggled to explain, but it was clear he really doesn’t think it’s privileged.
In the second instance, Your Honor, again, I think this is being personally over inclusive in an abundance of caution recognizing the circumstances that we find ourselves in, the second instance was again an item generally speaking — Your Honor, if you can give me a moment just to think on how to frame this.
The second instance was an item where a case team attorney saw that there might be — saw that there might be — saw that there were — bottom line is, Your Honor, I do not believe this information is privileged, but I still want to be respectful, and I want respect the process and Counsel’s opportunity to assert, but it was an instance where, I believe in my view, the case team attorney was exercising extreme caution in identifying a document that could potentially include privileged information and so, exercising that caution, gave it to the case team — or gave it to privilege review team to review, and that Your Honor, as counsel —
And while Hawk doesn’t directly address it, another place where Aileen Cannon unilaterally used information from the privilege review team report is in her claim that there were medical and tax records in the seized materials (see the bolded attribution, above).
Lacosta points to Judge Cannon’s asymmetrical reliance on this information in his motion to unseal the report.
Here, there is no compelling interest in maintaining the sealed status of the Filter Notice in this case, particularly in light of the Court’s reference to it in the Court’s Order appointing a special master. (DE:64 at 6, 15, & n.13.) Moreover, the United States has an interest in the Filter Notice being a part of the public record in this case and thereby equally available to all of the litigants in this matter.
This is a very subtle way of saying that for Bratt to litigate this issue, he needs to have the same information that both Trusty and Cannon are exploiting in their arguments. And, frankly, the public does too, because Cannon is quite clearly flipping normal investigative procedure on its head (again), granting the former President privileges that no criminal suspect in the United States gets.
Judge Cannon has, explicitly, turned the diligence of the investigative team into proof of harm. And because she has engaged in that kind of dishonesty, and because her reference to medical and tax records not only doesn’t deny these are government records, but also accompanies two other dishonest claims (the double counting and the treatment of a subjunctive statement as a concession), we should be very wary to read this claim as anything other than the public record suggests: that these are government records that involve some legal dispute.
Trump chose to use the levers of government to gain financial advantage and because of that there are years and years of government documents that involve legal disputes about his own personal and corporate finances. It should not surprise anyone that some of those materials were in boxes at Mar-a-Lago or stashed in his desk drawer. They are among the secrets he has most jealously guarded.
And unless and until Judge Cannon unseals that report about which she and Trump made asymmetric claims, we should not assume good faith on her part.
Update: Given Peterr’s question about my comment about notes, I elaborated on what I meant and the standard for personal notes under the Presidential Records Act.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Trump-Privileged.png313616emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2022-09-09 10:18:432022-09-09 13:01:21Perfect Specimen: Government Records about the Mazars Lawsuit and Trump’s COVID Treatment Would Be Government Records
