Trump in increasing legal peril one month on from Mar-a-Lago search

The photo is to be found appended to the 36-page court filing released by the Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday in its battle with Trump over classified records. Attachment F displays some of the confidential documents that the FBI discovered during their hotly contested search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

That was the message the DoJ wanted to transmit in releasing the photo: the time for frivolity is over.

Unusually for Trump, that last statement was correct. Never has a US president been subject to an involuntary search of their home by federal agents pursuing evidence in a criminal investigation.

Over the past four weeks a cascade of information has been released that tells the other side of the story. It transpires that the unprecedented nature of the FBI search was posited on the even more unprecedented behavior of the 45th president of the United States.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor who is author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and publisher of the Lucid newsletter about threats to democracy, says this blurring of public and private is central to his autocratic style of leadership.

By June 2018 such proprietary behavior was expressing itself in the White House. Politico reported that Trump was routinely tearing up official records rather than filing them for safekeeping in the National Archives as he was legally obliged to do.

It did not end there.

The FBI remained suspicious. Maybe it was because, when the agents were taken to look around the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, they were pointedly forbidden from opening or looking inside any of the White House boxes.

Maybe it was the surveillance footage captured outside the storage room, which the FBI obtained under a separate subpoena, which reportedly showed employees going in and out of the space that was supposed to have been secured.

All of this leaves several burning questions. Could any of this hyper-sensitive material already have found its way into the wrong hands?

Which brings us to the third pressing question: will Trump be indicted? Certainly, the peril of a criminal prosecution now looms large.

The DoJ has made clear in recent filings that it feels it has evidence of obstruction of a federal investigation. He also faces possible indictment under the Espionage Act, which punishes unauthorized retention or disclosure of national security information, and a third law prohibiting mishandling of sensitive government records.

But, then again, there are perils the other way too. McCabe looks back on his own interactions with Trump and is struck by the high price of inaction.