The first rule of Federal Indictment Club is: you don’t talk about your case. And the second rule of Federal Indictment Club is: you don’t talk about your case, period. You hire a good lawyer or two and let them talk about your case in public. The surest way to help the prosecution is to go on television and make a damaging admission about the key element of a charge.

Sort of like … this:

He should not be commenting on this at all, as it makes him look worse. Has he ever made one of his legal issues better by talking about them in detail in interviews? pic.twitter.com/Gw0ts1l6OG

— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) June 19, 2023

TRUMP: ‘We never got this stuff, this back. Can we please, please, could we have it back?’

BAIER: And they did ask for it?

TRUMP: [crosstalk] They have no — no —

BAIER: And they said, ‘could you give us the documents back?’ [crosstalk] And then they said — went to DoJ to subpoena you to get them back.

TRUMP: Which they’ve never done before.

BAIER: Right.

TRUMP: And in all fairness —

BAIER: Why not just hand them over then?

TRUMP: Because I had boxes — I wanted to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out. I don’t want to hand that over to NARA yet. And I was very busy, as you’ve sort of seen.

BAIER: Yeah. [crosstalk] But according to the indictment, you then tell this aide to move to other locations after telling your lawyers to say you’d fully complied with the subpoena, when you hadn’t.

TRUMP: But before I send boxes over, I have to take all my things out of them. These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things

Say what? That may not be quite the full Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men, but it certainly sounds like a tacit admission of deliberate obstruction in regard to the subpoena. Skip over the first 31 counts regarding the documents themselves in the indictment and go to counts 32 and 33, conspiracy to obstruct justice and withholding a record from a federal grand jury. Pay attention to the wording, emphases mine:

79. From on or about May 11, 2022, through in or around August 2022, in Palm Beach County, in the Southern District of Florida, and elsewhere, the defendants, DONALD J. TRUMP and WALTINE NAUTA, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with each other and with others known and unknown to the grand jury, to engage in misleading conduct toward another person and corruptly persuade another person to withhold a record, document, and other object from an official proceeding, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b)(2)(A), and to corruptly conceal a record, document, and other object from an official proceeding, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(1). …

83. From on or about May 11, 2022, through in or around August 2022, in Palm Beach County, in the Southern District of Florida, and elsewhere, the defendants, DONALD J. TRUMP and WALTINE NAUTA, did knowingly engage in misleading conduct toward another person, and knowingly corruptly persuade and attempt to persuade another person, with intent to cause and induce any person to withhold a record, document, and other object from an official proceeding; that is—(1) TRUMP attempted to persuade Trump Attorney 1 to hide and conceal documents from a federal grand jury; and (2) TRUMP and NAUTA misled Trump Attorney 1 by moving boxes that contained documents with classification markings so that Trump Attorney 1 would not find the documents and produce them to a federal grand jury.

Trump didn’t exactly use Colonel Jessup’s line, “You’re ***damned right I did!” when Baier asked the final question in this sequence. He did, however, tacitly agree with the indictment’s allegation in attempting to justify his actions. Baier asked whether he moved the boxes to hide the material and obstruct the grand jury, and Trump answered by justifying the actions of which the indictment accuses him.

You think Jack Smith and his attorneys are busy transcribing the whole interview at the moment? You’d better believe they are, and for good reason. Trump just made it almost impossible for a jury to believe any denial on these allegations, and his justification here would be damning in court. By talking publicly, Trump likely ruined a potential defense strategy for his attorneys, and now they will have to work around Trump’s public statement on national TV when this case comes to trial.

Bear in mind too that criminal defendants don’t have to testify in court. Trump could have refused to expose himself to cross-examination at trial and make Smith and his team prove obstruction on their own beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, Trump put himself on national TV and let Bret Baier cross-examine him, in a way that prosecutors can use whether Trump agrees to testify or not. And Trump botched the exchange and ended up making a potentially fatal admission, not because of a skilled attorney, but because a journalist simply read the elements of the indictment to him.

Now Smith and his team can play this to a jury, and Trump can’t stop it. Public admissions are admissible in court whether or not defendants choose to testify, and probably carry even more weight when they’re on videotape. (Even private admissions are admissible if direct witnesses to the admission are willing to testify to them.) Trump will almost certainly have to testify now to explain this away — and everyone can imagine how Trump will hold up under prosecutorial cross-examination.

This is a disaster for Trump’s legal team, assuming he can find attorneys who want to have to handle this mess. And we’re only a few days into this indictment; imagine what else Trump will admit in interviews and speeches. It’s gonna be a long run-up to trial. At this point, prosecutors might want to consider setting aside the document counts and just going to trial quickly on the obstruction and conspiracy charges, as long as Trump’s basically giving that game away.

Addendum: Jonathan Turley praises Baier’s dogged interview, a point I should have made as well. But Turley also notes that this isn’t the only damage Trump did to his defense in the interview either:

…Baier then reading back the audiotape transcript. Trump said that there was "not a document per se." So he is arguing that he was referring to newspaper articles etc — not an actual document…

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 19, 2023

…Trump also said that he did not want to keep classified documents but was in the course of discussing their return. He described the boxing of material as being hurried and disorganized.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 19, 2023

…I know that I have long been an unabashed fan of Bret but this interview is a tour de force for journalism. Notably, after Bret confronted Trump on his insistence that he won in 2020, Trump said "I would like to be less combative" but that it is not possible in this…

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 19, 2023

And if you haven’t caught it yet, be sure to read Bill Barr’s essay at the Free Press, in which he argues that Trump is his own worst attorney. This unforced error tonight is a great example.