The Arraignment Will Not Be Televised (with Gal Suburban)

Plus: Notes on the indictment

When I sat down with the open-source intelligence researcher Gal Suburban on Sunday to record today’s episode of the PREVAIL podcast, I was concerned that something would happen in Miami on Tuesday that mooted our discussion about the 38-count Trump/Nauta indictment. As it happened, nothing happened at all.

Oh, there was great pomp. Trump arrived at the courthouse with an embarrassingly excessive motorcade. “Why is Donald Trump being treated like a head of state as opposed to a criminal defendant?” the political pundit Steve Schmidt mused on The Warning. “This is all theatre.”

And so it was. There was Trump, his Crayola color palette popping in the hot sun: red tie, orange face, yellow hair, green money, blue suit—the guy was a veritable rainbow flag. The MAGA protestors who braved the jungles-of-’Nam-like humidity were decked out in white “Blacks for Trump” t-shirts, despite not being people of color, and were outnumbered by the reporters, most of whom were tripping over themselves to fuck up the coverage.

We saw Trump march into the building. We saw him right after, greeting supporters at a Cuban restaurant (where—big shock—he didn’t pay for the meals like he promised). We saw him even later, stirring up the crowd at Bedminster at yet another hateful rally, where he uncorked lie after lie after lie. And we saw him on the cover of the New York Times the next day, looking positively triumphant. (When I saw that cover in my Twitter feed, it was so awful that I actually checked to make sure it was real.)

What we didn’t get to see was the arraignment itself. That was held in the courtroom, where cameras and most of the reporters were not allowed. Thank goodness for Anna Bower of Lawfare, for doing what the mainstream papers did not and actually, you know, describing the fucking scene in there:

When I finally enter courtroom 13-3…Trump is already seated at a table on the right-hand side of the room. Overhead, a warm white light appears to shine directly on the former president, casting his orange-blonde hair in a golden hue. He is, both literally and metaphorically, in the limelight. Yet it strikes me that Trump—the man who positioned bigness as a central issue of American politics (“hugely,” “bigly,” “little Marco”)—looks unmistakably small. 

The courtroom is large, almost cavernous, adorned with slabs of creamy marble and caramel wood. Across the room, the judge’s bench towers over the rest of us. 

Trump, for his part, sits hunched between his attorneys, his trademark grandiosity exchanged for something like solemnity or melancholy.

A murmur travels down the row in which I am seated as members of the media spot the man who has played a role in bringing the famously braggadocious former president to this courtroom: Special Counsel Jack Smith. He is perched in the front row of the gallery on the left side of the room, behind the table where his colleagues from the Justice Department are seated for the arraignment. Sporting a characteristically steely expression, Smith appears to be pointedly staring at Trump as we await the judge’s entrance.

But we didn’t get to see Jack Smith’s death glare. We didn’t see Trump cower and fidget. We didn’t see his attorneys push back on the flimsy conditions of release pending trial requested by the prosecution. We didn’t see that the judge presiding over the arraignment was not Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed MAGA judge who will oversee the actual case, but a magistrate judge named Jonathan Goodman. The old adage “justice is blind” was taken a bit too literally.

There was no perp walk, no cuffs, no mugshot, no bail set, no conditions for release beyond “don’t do more crimes” and “don’t talk about the case to each other,” no gag order, no surrender of passports, and, as already mentioned, no cameras. The whole thing was a travesty, almost Yelstin-y in its dysfunction. Was Tuesday a good day for the rule of law? The jury’s still out.

We, the American people—including, and especially, the MAGA cultists—need to see justice being done. We can’t depend on writers, however good they may be, to describe that the emperor is naked. We need to see his awful nakedness for ourselves. Seeing is believing, a picture’s worth a thousand words, and every photograph of Trump from Tuesday shows him glorious. Miami may as well have been a MAGA rally. The only visual evidence of Trump in the courtroom are these ridiculous artist sketches that make it look like he’s remaking the “Take On Me” video.

Denying us the right to bear witness to this historical spectacle is a form of gaslighting perpetrated by the judicial branch. This is erasure of history. If the indictment didn’t exist, I would begin to doubt that Tuesday’s arraignment happened at all.

Fortunately, the indictment does exist. And the crimes alleged therein are absolutely devastating. Those pages economically and skillfully describe the actions of the worst traitor in the quarter-millennium history of our country.

The documents Trump cavalierly dumped in his auxiliary bathroom—or, rather, instructed Nauta to dump—contain the sort of information that could get millions of Americans, and millions of our allies, killed. This should not be a surprise. In his negligent mismanagement of the pandemic, Trump has already killed three hundred thousand more Americans than should have died. Too, in the early days of his presidency, the CIA was losing foreign assets left and right. To borrow Matt Gaetz’s phrasing: who is naïve enough to think that was a coincidence?

Trump put us all at risk: every single human being in this country regardless of political affiliation, every single human being in every country that shares intelligence with the United States, every single pro-U.S. informant in hostile foreign nations like Iran and Russia and China—the entire free world, in short. Most of all, by stealing and almost certainly disseminating this information, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces put those armed forces in grave peril.

That those classified documents are “out in the wild,” as LB put it on last week’s The Five 8, “could have such debilitating consequences for our intelligence community, for our military readiness and safety,” Gal Suburban says. “As a military spouse, it’s . . . you know, sometimes when they deploy my husband, he doesn’t get to tell me where he goes. So the fact that I don’t even get to know, I can’t say anything to my kids, I don’t know where he is, doing whatever operation he’s doing, but this guy can just throw around this shit, like it doesn’t matter?”

“I uphold that obligation for secrecy and for support of my husband’s mission, and the military’s mission to keep us safe,” she continues. “And I would expect that same level at least, if not far more, from the Commander-in-Chief, who’s responsible for the lives of the guys that are willing to sacrifice everything for freedom and liberty and the American way of life. So it pisses me off. . . . And anybody who’s served in the military, is currently in the military, or gives a shit about the military, should be pissed—should be absolutely pissed—that [Trump] was so careless, and so irresponsible, and lacked the patriotism to protect the information of the United States. I just think it’s disgraceful.”

Gal is, objectively, correct. What Trump did is disgraceful. What the Republicans in Congress are doing, covering for his horrible crimes, is disgraceful. What the court did, not allowing cameras in the courtroom, is disgraceful. The messaging and strategizing by the Democrats, particularly in the Senate, is also disgraceful. The media coverage isn’t a disgrace, but hasn’t exactly distinguished itself. Enough!

Make America Graceful Again.

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S5 E16: Notes on the Trump Indictment (with Gal Suburban)

One week ago, Jack Smith unsealed the 38-count indictment against Donald John Trump and his valet, Waltine Nauta. OSINT researcher extraordinaire Gal Suburban breaks it all down with Greg Olear. Plus: it’s Nauta love song.

Follow Gal:
https://twitter.com/gal_suburban

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Photo credit: Sketch of Trump leaving the courtroom, via Elizabeth Williams of the AP.