Bess Levin at Vanity Fair has a handy-dandy guide to all the legal trouble lined up against Trump. (Vanity Fair gives you one free article, and when that’s used up try an incognito window or another browser and you can usually get to read another one.) Here is the list.
*The Classified Document/Mar-a-Lago investigation
*The Justice Department investigation into January 6/plot to overturn the election
*Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s criminal investigation into election interference
*The Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Case Against the Trump Organization, Etc.
*The New York Attorney General’s Civil Investigation Into the Trump Organization
*The Westchester County district attorney’s Criminal Investigation of the Trump Organization
*The DC Attorney General’s Criminal Investigation of January 6
*The E. Jean Carroll Defamation Suit
*Mary Trump’s lawsuit for defrauding her out of millions of dollars
*The House of Representatives’ January 6 Lawsuit
*The Eric Swalwell Suit over the attempt to stop the Electoral College certification
*The Capitol Police January 6 lawsuits
*The Metropolitan Police January 6 lawsuit
*The Michael Cohen lawsuit
*The Class Action Lawsuit Against the Trump Biz and the Trumps
*The NAACP Legal Defense Fund Voting Rights Lawsuit
*The Trump Tower Assault Lawsuit filed by five people who said Trump’s security assalted them while they were protesting in 2015
I’d forgotten about some of those. All are still pending.
Rolling Stone reports that the FBI is questioning Trump’s National Security Staff about his top secret document alibi.
Two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone that the FBI has begun asking former Trump administration officials whether they’ve heard of the so-called “standing order” Trump claims to have given. In recent days, the sources say, the feds have sent interview requests to the ex-officials, including former National Security Council personnel. The FBI has asked some of them to visit local FBI field offices to answer follow-up questions concerning the ex-president, classified and highly sensitive documents, and the alleged “order.” That order, Trump’s office insisted last week, dictated that any “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified.”
18 former top Trump administration officials tell CNN they never heard any such order issued during their time working for Trump, and that they believe the claim to be patently false.
Several officials laughed at the notion. One senior administration official called it “bullsh*t.” Two of Trump’s former chiefs of staff went on the record to knock down the claim.
“Nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given,” said John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff for 17 months from 2017 to 2019. “And I can’t imagine anyone that worked at the White House after me that would have simply shrugged their shoulders and allowed that order to go forward without dying in the ditch trying to stop it.”
Of course, we don’t know that anyone working for Trump really would have died in a ditch trying to stop Trump from taking secret documents to his residence — I am hugely skeptical, actually — but that’s the story they’re going with now.