Clay Risen

We knew it would be bad. Even so, it’s bracing just how bad the evidence laid out by the Justice Department against Donald Trump is.

The indictment against Trump and his personal valet, Walt Nauta, unsealed this afternoon, lays out the federal case against the former president in vivid, shocking, and sometimes even wry detail. An indictment is not a conviction—it’s a set of allegations by prosecutors, without rebuttal from the defendant. Trump is innocent in court until proven guilty, and has loudly and insistently proclaimed that he is an innocent man. But the evidence included shows why the case against Trump is so disturbing, and why it will be tough for him to defend. And the crimes it details are among the stupidest imaginable.

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I’m always looking for a way to get near Mel Brooks. Can you blame me? He has acted in, directed, produced, and written some of the most memorable films in human history—among them The Producers, Blazing Saddles, History of the World, Part I, and Spaceballs. He is the reason I went into comedy. As a young man, I obsessively watched his films and his appearances on late-night television. I would listen to his 2000 Year Old Man albums—in which Mel played the character of an ancient man explaining the origins of humanity—and dream of having the same job as him.

It’s as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral.

Who believes that Governor Ron DeSantis—so badly trailing in the polls behind former President Donald Trump—is genuinely upset by his rival’s federal indictment? Or that Speaker Kevin McCarthy—so disgusted by Trump in private—does not inwardly rejoice to see Trump meet justice?

The Fox News talkers have been trying for months to sideline Trump and promote DeSantis. Now they have a turn of events that promises both to help their corporate political agenda and to stoke controversy and ratings. They must be positively ecstatic at the network’s New York headquarters today.

So many in the Republican and conservative world wish Trump off the stage. So few possess the courage or integrity to say so aloud.

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Former President Donald Trump, along with one of his aides, has been indicted for federal crimes involving highly sensitive national-security documents. Trump and his enablers are already trying to brush the charges away as the result of a witch hunt over a minor issue, but this indictment shows why Trump was, and remains, a threat to national security.

Defiant Recklessness

Special Counsel Jack Smith has successfully petitioned to unseal the indictment of Donald Trump and his aide Walt Nauta on multiple charges revolving around Trump’s removal of classified material from the White House and his belligerent refusal to return them. The charges include making false statements, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding and concealing records, and willful retention of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act.

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The first time it happened, I assumed it was a Millennial thing. Our younger neighbors had come over with their kids and a projector for backyard movie night—Clueless, I think, or maybe The Goonies.

“Oh,” I said as the opening scene began, “you left the subtitles on.”

“Oh,” the husband said, “we always leave the subtitles on.”

Now, I don’t like to think of myself as a snob—snobs never do—but in that moment, I felt something gurgling up my windpipe that can only be described as snobbery, a need to express my aesthetic horror at the needless gashing of all those scenes. All that came out, though, was: Why? They don’t like missing any of the dialogue, he said, and sometimes it’s hard to hear, or someone is trying to sleep, or they’re only half paying attention, and the subtitles are right there waiting to be flipped on, so … why not?

In the weeks before he took office as president, Donald Trump had a portentous, private chat with the broadcast journalist Lesley Stahl, a prelude to a 60 Minutes interview. As Stahl recounted later, she asked Trump why he so relentlessly brutalized the media. His answer, she said, was strikingly direct: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’”

This is, of course, the thinking of an authoritarian. If you can successfully cast doubt on facts and the people whose mission it is to report them, you have tremendous latitude to set your own narrative and do as you please. Over time, Trump has worked to discredit and demean any institution that raises inconvenient truths or seeks to hold him accountable for his actions—not just the media, but law enforcement and the election system itself.

For three months this year, I bled nearly every day. My doctor doesn’t know why. Google doesn’t know why. The condition is simply called “postmenopausal bleeding,” and medicine’s best guess as to the cause is that the postmenopausal hormone-replacement therapy I started last November suddenly made my endometrium, the lining of the uterus, “unstable.” All scientific knowledge added up to “If it’s still happening in six months, get back in touch.” (I’m still bleeding intermittently, and I don’t know why.) This is the kind of massive medical shrug that anyone with female anatomy has probably encountered.

Despite major advances for women over the past 100 years—the invention of the contraceptive pill, greater access to safe abortions—much of female biology is still woefully underserved by science. There are reasons for this, most notably the historical exclusion of women from medical and pharmaceutical trials, partly because our awkward hormone cycles were thought to skew results. There’s also the fact that some scientists still project findings from research on men onto women, seeming not to realize that women aren’t just small men: Women are different down to the cellular level, meaning that many of our immune responses, experiences of pain, and symptoms (including, for instance, those that accompany a heart attack) may be different from men’s. Are you having a nasty, unexpected side effect from your medication? That could be because most drugs were developed with male bodies in mind. A 2020 review of 86 common medications, including antidepressants, cardiovascular drugs, and painkillers, found that women were likely routinely overmedicated and suffered adverse reactions nearly twice as often as men.

Donald Trump has been indicted by federal prosecutors in connection with his removal of documents from the White House, the former president announced on his social-media site tonight. He said that he has been summoned to appear on Tuesday at a U.S. courthouse in Miami. Several outlets reported that he faces seven counts, but more information was not immediately available.

“I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States,” Trump wrote in a post, adding, “I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”

David A. Graham: Don’t take your eye of Jack Smith

In fact, the indictment is, like so many of the signal moments of his presidency, both eminently foreseeable and utterly astonishing. If it never seemed possible that a former president would face such charges, that’s mostly because it never seemed possible that a president would abscond with a large number of documents and then defy a subpoena to return them. Trump’s shock also reflects his feeling that he was, or ought to be, immune to consequences for his actions and not subject to the same rule of law as other citizens.

Updated at 11:34 a.m. ET on June 7, 2023.

“How are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me. “It’s very simple.”

It was the fall of 2022. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy.

“The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” Licht said.

As the stretcher was wheeled into the room, I glanced up from the patient chart. Following right behind was a burly man in the distinctive dark-green uniform of the U.S. Border Patrol. The patient, a young woman, lay shivering. A spinal collar had been placed around her neck to immobilize it in case it was broken. Her face, fixed upward, grimaced.

“Wall fall?” I asked as the nurses prepared to move the patient from the stretcher to the bed.

“Yeah,” the officer said.

“How high?”

“Eighteen feet. We found her on the ground. Not sure how long she was out there like this.”

It was the end of the monsoon season in El Paso. On my way to this night shift several hours earlier, I had driven through a torrent of rain that must have slicked the surface the young woman had climbed.