Trump and "Perfect" Phone calls
or why Fanni Willis has Trump's number
Donald Trump has a penchant for secrecy and ownership.
Rumors of Donald Trump, as a businessman, keeping documents from opposing counsel, courts, and likely his own attorneys met reality in January of this year when Letitia James went to court and called him on it.1
The 3,500 or so vendors who got stiffed by Donald Trump over the years (and their attorneys) must have bristled over the revelations that Donald Trump not only withheld documents, but also retained them at the Trump Organization offices. The “why” of Trump doing so is some what puzzling.
Imagine holding onto a piece of evidence that would likely have doomed you in a lawsuit. It’s a bizarre trophy of sorts on one hand and pure stupidity on other. The answer may lie in Trump’s narcissism or psychopathology. Regardless, it’s not normal.
In the case of The Trump Organization, Trump kept those documents locked in a filing cabinet. In the case of the classified documents and other records seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, things were stored more willy nilly because Donald Trump did not begin packing up until after January 6th2 and Mar-aLago is but one of Trump’s homes.3
And Trump’s wrangling over the documents seized has more to do with Trump’s belief that the documents were his than using classified documents as a fungible asset. To Trump’s way of thinking, he could do whatever he wanted with any document from his presidency, because he was their sole owner — not because much of the highly classified and top secret documents could have made him an actual billionaire if sold.
Given the choice between “Oh Jeez, we were in such a rush to move out of the White House and I was thinking I wanted this stuff for my presidential library, I never focused on following protols for this kind of stuff,” or asserting that he personally owned everything that was seized; Donald Trump chose the latter and hired a cadre of new lawyers to aid him in that quest.
The entirety of the Mar-a-Lago document imbroglio is Trump wanting to keep “his stuff” and insisting that its level of importance and secrecy can be defined by Trump just thinking it so.4
As presidential records go, documents are pretty easy. For the most part, the contents can be declassified (if done properly), countermanded, updated, minimalized, or marginalized by memos, executive orders, etc. without issue. Whitewashing is the paintbrush of political spin.
Phone calls, on the other hand, are extremely dificult. Ownership of a phone call is not a sole proprietorship nor is it secret.
Trump should have learned that during his First Impeachment.5
Sadly, Trump has taken, for the second time in the last two months, to repeating his phrase “perfect phone call”6 from the Zelensky conversation in July 2019 to defend himself from the special grand jury in Georgia and from prosecutor Fani Willis.7
The problem with the phrase “perfect phone call” is not that it’s a poor political defense (the phrase was rarely used by Trump’s GOP defenders in the First Impeachment debate), it’s that’s no legal defense whatsover.
The reason one might not want to use the phrase “perfect phone call” in defending oneself for “high crimes and misdemeanors” was rather made obvious during the House Impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Vlodymyr Zelensky — the 30 minute call was recorded (on both ends) and the context of Trump’s “quid pro quo” demand for releasing for military aid (which had already been congressionally approved) was easily discernible.
The problem is that no one on the Georgia end agrees with Trump’s description of the January 2, 2021 conversation and none of the lawyers on Trump’s end of his “perfect phone call” were telling him he was committing a crime.8
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-organization-produced-few-donald-trump-documents-new-york-ag-2022-1
https://news.yahoo.com/trump-frantically-packed-documents-him-022010173.html
Trump spends hit summers at his golf club in Bedminster, NJ.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/21/trump-i-could-declassify-documents-by-thinking-about-it-00058212
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-georgia-2657880168/
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-georgia-perfect-call/