Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.
Megan Lebowitz and Kyle Stewart at NBC:
Former special counsel Jack Smith's team had evidence that President Donald Trump had classified documents, including materials relevant to business interests, after he left office following his first term, according to a memo the Justice Department gave to Congress.Aimee Picchi and Mary Cunningham at CBS:
The memo, obtained by NBC News, summarizes what prosecutors were working on as of January 2023 related to an investigation of allegations that Trump mishandled classified documents.
“Trump had in his possession some highly sensitive documents — the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have,” the memo said. They included one document that was previously “accessible by only 6? people, including the president.”
“That document is one we will need,” prosecutors said in the memo.
Smith’s team also wrote, “Trump had many documents in his possession — so many and in so many different places that it is hard to fathom that he was not aware.”
The memo said Smith’s team believed Trump may have shown a classified map to other people on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, an event that the team says was witnessed by Susie Wiles, now Trump’s chief of staff.
Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, summarized the memo's content in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, saying that the document included "damning evidence" about Trump's procurement of highly sensitive documents.
Financial markets experts are raising concerns about possible insider trading after an unusual spike in oil futures trading only minutes before President Trump announced talks with Iran on Truth Social.
Mr. Trump's announcement, which he posted on social media shortly after 7 a.m. EST on Monday, caused oil prices to tumble and the Dow Jones Industrial Average to surge more than 1,000 points. The president also touted what he described as "productive" peace talks with Iran, providing relief to investors concerned about rising oil prices and their impact on inflation and economic growth.
The message amounted to a sudden shift from Mr. Trump's post on Saturday that threatened to "obliterate" Iran's power plants unless it reopened the Strait of Hormuz to ship traffic. That abrupt change, which caught investors by surprise, has drawn scrutiny over unusual trading activity just before Mr. Trump issued Monday's market-moving announcement.
"Massive spike"
In the minutes before Mr. Trump's Monday morning post, there was a spike in oil futures trading, according to Bloomberg News and the Financial Times. Between 6:49 a.m. and 6:50 a.m., about 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts changed hands, with a notional value of $580 million, according to the Financial Times' analysis of Bloomberg data.
The average trading level for the same time period over the previous five trading days was about 700 contracts, Bloomberg News reported.
