Unravelling treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe is latest sign of escalating tension between NATO and Russia.

Many people believed that a federal indictment of Donald Trump for his mishandling of classified information would never come—that the rule of law simply could not withstand the virulence and impetuousness of this one man and his cowardly enablers, that Attorney General Merrick Garland lacked the fortitude to weather the political fallout of indicting a former president, and that Trump’s signature outmaneuvering would carry the day—as if he really were a king.

The ubiquitous question posed during the Trump presidency—can he do that?—continues to be the wrong question. The real question is still: If he does that, who will hold him accountable? Until Thursday, the answer was nobody. Which meant that the answer to the first question—can he do that?—was yes. (Both an earlier indictment out of Manhattan and the judgment in a civil lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll were in the main for behavior that preceded Trump’s presidency.) What finally caught up with him is the structure of the Constitution itself, and its foundational premise of a government accountable to the people.

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Having rebelled against an absolute monarchy, the authors of the Declaration of Independence aimed to establish a government composed of individuals who “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The document denounced King George III as a “Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, [and who] is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” The preamble to the Constitution was written in the first person—“We the People of the United States”—rather than as a pronouncement from God, from whom the divine right of kings emanated. James Madison explained in “Federalist No. 49”—one of the essays he, Alexander Hamiton, and John Jay wrote to garner support for the Constitution’s ratification—that “the people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived”; in “Federalist No. 37,” he said that “the genius of republican liberty, seems to demand on one side, not only, that all power should be derived from the people; but, that those entrusted with it should be kept in dependence on the people.” The Supreme Court has likewise repeatedly underscored that “the Framers, in perhaps their most important contribution, conceived of a Federal Government directly responsible to the people.”

Accountability and the idea of government by the people thus operate as reciprocals: Because the people retain the ultimate power of government, those in power must be accountable to the populace. “To hold otherwise,” the Court has written, “is to overthrow the basis of our constitutional law.” But in the age of Trump, accountability for public officials became frighteningly elusive, for two reasons: The Constitution is sparing in its prose, and it is hydraulic in its structure.

Thus, for example, when Trump directed then–White House Counsel Don McGahn to have Special Counsel Robert Mueller removed, the Constitution’s text offered no answer to the novel questions his actions presented: whether a president’s Article II power to execute the laws was spacious enough to halt an investigation into his own wrongdoing, or whether even the president must yield to an act of Congress barring obstruction of executive-branch investigations. Without a prosecution of Trump, the judicial branch had no opportunity to weigh in. Presumably, the Framers fully expected that impeachment would be a primary check on a president’s malfeasance, but Mueller’s report into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, which detailed 10 acts of obstruction by Trump, did not prompt impeachment proceedings. He went on to survive two full impeachment efforts based on separate behaviors, including his role in the deadly mob effort to thwart the peaceful transfer of power to his successor. Trump and his backers came to understand that congressional checks on a rogue president were a mere nothing.

Many of Trump’s supporters will condemn the latest indictment as politically motivated harassment—the opposite of legal accountability under a fair system of laws. John F. Harris, the author of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, wrote of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation that “to Clinton defenders, Whitewater became a synonym for false accusations, partisan vendettas, and prosecutorial abuse.” The difference between the Starr investigation (in which I served as an associate independent counsel) and this one is that Starr’s grand jury did not amass enough evidence of wrongdoing by President Bill Clinton to criminally charge him with anything. Presented with criminal laws enacted by Congress, the Florida grand jury determined that the evidence bearing on Trump’s case has met the threshold of probable cause that he committed multiple crimes.

[David Frum: An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies]

Trump’s fate is now in the hands of the judicial branch—judges appointed for life, along with a jury of his peers. In his treatise on English common law, the 18th-century jurist and legal scholar Sir William Blackstone called the jury trial “the glory of the English law” that is needed for “the impartial administration of justice.” As Trump has already seen once with the $5 million jury verdict for sexual abuse in the Carroll case, trials are governed by authenticated evidence, established procedures, and constitutional rules—not by virulent attacks and slippery lies. When it comes to Donald Trump, a federal court in Florida is where the American people will finally have their day in court too. The Constitution itself will be better for it.

Russia says Ukraine has started a long-expected counteroffensive but denies Kyiv made gains along the front lines.

Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted Friday that Ukrainian troops have started a long-expected counteroffensive and were suffering “significant” losses. His comments came just hours after a string of drone strikes inside Russian territory.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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.

When Trump learned of the indictment yesterday, he and his devoted coterie of Republican apologists, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, got right to work trying to minimize the charges as a politically motivated “weaponization” of the law. Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who (at least in theory) is running against Trump, felt the need to side with the most notorious Florida Man now facing justice. As my colleague David Frum notes, this is about as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral, but the fact that DeSantis and others feel the need to placate such paranoia is indicative of how unhinged the GOP base has become.

Smith, however, isn’t pussyfooting around: The charges—38 of them—are a big deal. And before the GOP gaslighting reaches supernova levels, let’s also bear in mind that what Trump actually did is a big deal too. He claimed that he declassified, by fiat, boxes of classified information, and then appears to have left all of that material sitting in ballrooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms. To this day, he insists that he had every right to do whatever he wanted with America’s secrets. Fortunately, the court has unsealed the indictment, because Americans need to know, and care, about the magnitude of Trump’s alleged offenses.

To understand the severity of the charges against Trump, consider a thought experiment: Imagine that Vladimir Putin is one day driven from the Kremlin, perhaps in a coup or in the face of a popular revolt. He jumps into his limousine and heads for self-imposed exile in a remote dacha. His trunk is full of secret documents that he decided belong to him, including details of the Russian nuclear deterrent and Russia’s military weaknesses.

Now imagine how valuable those boxes would be to any intelligence organization in the world. I spent the early years of my career analyzing Soviet and Russian documents as an academic Sovietologist, and I would have loved to see such materials. Small, seemingly trivial details—something as innocuous as a desk calendar or a notepad—might not mean much to a layperson, but to a professional, they could be pure gold. To get even a peek at such Russian materials would be an intelligence triumph.

But of course, I would never have been able to lay my hands on them, because a cache of such immense importance, if U.S. operatives spirited any of it out of Russia, would have been secured in a vault somewhere deep in the CIA. Trump, meanwhile, left highly sensitive American documents lying around at a golf resort like practice balls on the driving range. According to the indictment:

The Mar-a-Lago Club was an active social club, which, between January 2021 and August 2022, hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests. After TRUMP’s presidency, The Mar-a-Lago Club was not an authorized location for the storage, possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents. Nevertheless, TRUMP stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club—including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

Actually, it might be harder to steal practice balls. “The Storage Room,” the indictment notes, “was near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop, and various other rooms.” These are not exactly low-traffic areas. Worse yet, the indictment asserts that Trump had some of these documents at his club in New Jersey, where he showed files to people who had no business seeing them. (One of them, according to the indictment, was something Trump claimed was a plan of attack on a foreign country prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official.)

Normally, when there is spillage of classified material—and such events are common, including during presidential transitions—it’s treated much like the spillage of toxic waste: Even if it’s an accident, everyone involved must cooperate to find the source of the spill, evaluate the amount of danger, and contain and clean the area. What Trump has already admitted to doing—taking classified documents and then defying the U.S. government’s repeated demands to return them—is like driving off with a truckload of toxic chemicals, splashing them around, and then, when the guys in the hazmat suits show up, telling them he had every right to dump out the barrels on his own property and that they can go take a hike.

Judging from the indictment (and its damning photographs), Trump did all of this while leaving some of the most tempting intelligence targets in the Western world open to theft or reproduction. The indictment is both astounding and horrifying, with pictures of classified materials sitting in unsecured boxes around Mar-a-Lago that could give hives to anyone who’s ever held a security clearance (as I did for most of my adult life). At this point, we may never know who saw what, or which documents are now in the hands of our enemies. In any decent democracy, this intentional and defiant recklessness with classified material would be added to the list of acts that should prohibit Trump from ever holding any position of government responsibility ever again.

Trump’s enablers, however, will try to set the agenda, just as they did when Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed his report in 2019 on Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians. Back then, Attorney General William Barr performed a major act of civic sabotage by bowdlerizing Mueller’s findings before anyone saw the actual report. I was in Switzerland at the time, and when a daily newspaper back in the United States asked me to write about the report, all I had to go on was Barr’s version; although I suspected that the full truth was worse, I could write only from what I had at the moment—which is exactly what Barr intended.

Trump-supporting Republicans are attempting to replicate Barr’s dishonest play by convincing Americans that Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have personally indicted Trump over a nothingburger. Like many who have commented on the documents fiasco, McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, and others must know that this is a flat lie, but it’s a lie that will work on millions of people. Smith and the government of the United States have made clear that Donald Trump has yet again betrayed his country. The rest of us should say so to our fellow citizens—and to those craven elected representatives who refuse to admit it—loudly and clearly.

Related:

An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies This indictment is different.

Today’s News

The White House released intelligence indicating that Russia plans to build a drone-manufacturing plant east of Moscow using materials supplied by Iran. Air quality has improved in the northeastern United States and Ontario as wildfires continue to burn in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada; firefighters from the U.S., France, and some Commonwealth nations have joined local fire crews in combating the ongoing blazes. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a video interview on Friday that Russia can “definitely state” that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

Dispatches

Books Briefing: The author Charles Portis was a “uniquely Southern” storyteller whose stories dripped with pathos and humor, Gal Beckerman writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Don’t censor racism out of the past. The price of Title 42 is the battered bodies of my patients. Inside Frank Bascombe’s head, again

Culture Break

Read. A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is told by a narrator whose reliability comes into question as the story unfolds—and is eventually undone entirely by a single pronoun slip.

Watch. Past Lives, in theaters, is a film in which distance and quiet are key to understanding a soaring intimacy.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

As you can see, I am back from my vacation. Each year, I make a pilgrimage to Las Vegas; my wife and I are native New Englanders, but we have come to love the desert and the dry, clear air that gives us a break from humidity and allergies. (Every time I go to the Southwest, I think of the late Harry Anderson, playing the Boston trickster “Harry the Hat” on Cheers and sneering at a competing con man from Phoenix: “I was never impressed by Arizona hustlers, except they got good sinuses.”) I like the noise and bustle of casinos: I play some blackjack and throw some dice, and, yes, I know the odds are against me. Shush. Let me enjoy my kitschy moment of thinking I’m hanging with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis and Joey Bishop before their 3 a.m. show.

Speaking of the Rat Pack, I also love that at least a few Vegas steakhouses are trying to enforce a lost tradition: dress codes. I am a bear on this issue and always have been when it comes to fine dining. I caused a bit of consternation on Twitter when I said this the other day; there are people who think dress codes are outdated and uptight and even racist—which they can be, if they are enforced selectively. Otherwise, sorry, but not sorry: No beachwear and no tank tops, thank you. No ball caps. No overly revealing clothes, please, and gentlemen must wear closed-toe shoes. And if you reek of perfectly legal cannabis, that is your right, but (at least at one famous locale) you might not be seated. The days of jackets and ties are over, but there’s nothing wrong with dressing like an adult, and if you’re going to hang with the memory of Dino and Sammy, and drink overpriced bourbon, the least you can do is take off your hat and show up wearing a clean shirt.

— Tom

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.