The Devil Wears Depends
A former executive assistant to Donald Trump has flipped on him.
It opens like a blockbuster Hollywood movie. A desperately harried—but attractive and professional—executive assistant is seated outside the Oval Office, trying to make sense of her boss’s scribbles on a notecard. Another aide is arguing in the background with what sounds like a bellowing man.
The assistant squints, cocks her head. Then she flips over the card his words are written on.
“CLASSIFIED” appears stamped across the top of it. Something about a call with a foreign leader. She winces.
Her office mate, an annoying staffer who clearly went to Harvard or Yale, probably Federalist Society, walks by, notices.
“Beautiful Mind material?” he asks. She shares a nervous laugh with him.
Then the voice. His voice.
“MOLLY!!” He always shouts her name.
“Yes, Mr. President!” she squeaks, shoving the CLASSIFIED notecard in with his notes in her desk.
“I NEED YOU IN HERE!”
She looks across the hallway, catches the eye of Cassidy Hutchinson, who is stuck next to her boss, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The two women share a burden, at the beck and call of powerful men who are pressing the limits of the law nearly every day.
But it was each their choice to take the position. As in The Devil Wears Prada, “A million Republican girls would kill for that job.”
“Right away, sir!”
Flash forward to a scene several years later. She is in a room, and there are prosecutors, one nice one sitting across from her, a taller one standing with arms crossed. Molly now looks older, a bit harder around her eyes. She’s seen things. Her lawyer is seated next to her.
“Would you state your name for the record?”
“Yes. My name is Molly Michael.”
The assistant’s assistance
Prosecutors have an amazing cooperating witness in the case against the former president, now pending in federal court in Miami. Molly Michael is Donald Trump’s former executive assistant, who worked with him inside the White House, then followed him to Mar-a-Lago after he departed. In the indictment and the superseding indictment against Trump, she’s known by a different name: Trump Employee 2.
Trump had always been wary of whether Michael would flip on him. She had resigned in the wake of Trump’s refusal to cooperate with authorities, just after the FBI conducted a warranted search of Mar-a-Lago. Now a scoop by ABC News, which dropped on Monday late afternoon of this week, confirms what Trump had feared: Michael has been working with prosecutors, providing significant details about efforts by the ex-president, her old boss, to prevent the return of top secret and other classified materials.
Michael had earlier turned over a trove of information that has assisted investigators in the reconstruction of the ex-president’s attempts to obstruct and willfully retain top secret and other classified material. That information exists in the form of calendar entries, texts and emails—the kind of evidence that is hard to refute. As the Washington Post summarized,
Michael’s written communications have provided investigators with a detailed understanding of the day-to-day activity at Mar-a-Lago at critical moments.
Perhaps because of her centrality to the narrative, Michael appears at key moments in the charging document. As the New York Times reported earlier this summer,
Prosecutors described a text she sent another employee about how far away from Mr. Trump the boxes should be stored: “Anything that’s not the beautiful mind paper boxes can definitely go to storage,” she wrote in one message. At another point, the indictment says, Ms. Michael took a photograph of boxes before Mr. Trump went through at least some of them in late 2021, as the National Archives and Records Administration pressed for their return.
At one point, according to ABC News, Michael even helped turn over some classified notecards that the FBI agents had missed in their search, including the ones in her desk with Trump’s notes on them, scribbled across our nation’s secrets as if they were mere scrap paper.
The cooperation has been ongoing for some time. Michael told investigators last year that she had grown increasingly concerned with how Trump was handling requests from the National Archives, which had demanded return of all government documents at Mar-a-Lago. She indicated at the time that she felt Trump’s claims would be easy to disprove.
Trump also appears to have obstructed justice by attempting to influence her testimony. When Trump learned that the FBI wanted to talk to Michael, she recalls that he said to her, “You don’t know anything about the boxes.”
Reconstruction of obstruction
In fact, Michael did know a lot about the boxes, and Trump knew that she did. He just urged her to keep quiet about it, and that’s a big, crimey no-no.
Moreover, Trump was quite knowledgeable about the boxes, too. She recounted that by late 2021, Trump had ordered some 90 boxes of Trump White House materials be sent into a basement storage room at Mar-a-Lago. As ABC News reported back in June, Michael texted back and forth with a woman named Hayley Harrison (currently an aide to Melania Trump and named as Trump Employee 1 in the indictment) about moving boxes out of the business center at Mar-a-Lago to provide more room for staff to work.
Michael sent a telling text about this request: “Woah!! Ok so potus specifically asked Walt for those boxes to be in the business center because they are his ‘papers.’”
After the boxes were moved to storage, according to Michael, Trump would have some brought up from time to time for his personal review. And it was Michael along with one other employee—currently indicted defendant Walt Nauta, who is Trump’s personal valet—who would bring them up to him.
Trump ultimately only returned some 15 boxes to the National Archives, which fell woefully short of what was demanded, but a sign of progress in Michael’s view. When the National Archives discovered classified materials among the boxes, however, it referred the matter to the Justice Department, and, according to Michael, Trump began to grow more reluctant to cooperate.
Then Trump again ordered her to obstruct justice. According to Michael, Trump told her to help spread a message that no more boxes existed, when there were scores of them still on the property.
Michael tried to reason with Trump. She pointed out that many people, including maintenance workers, knew about the boxes. She later told investigators that she believed Trump knew his claims about “no more boxes” of government documents were false because he knew the contents of them better than anyone, and because he had seen a photograph of the boxes in the storage room with the 90 boxes in it, not just 15.
Nauta very good liar
Besides providing a direct link with personal recollection about Trump’s efforts to stymie the return of documents to the National Archives, Michael presents a very serious threat to one defendant who so far has not agreed to cooperate: Walt Nauta.
According to the indictment, Nauta and Michael exchanged text messages between November 2021 and January 2022 about bringing boxes from the storage room to Trump’s residence so he could review their contents. In one instance, in December 2021, Nauta texted Michael that several of Trump’s boxes had fallen on the floor with their contents spilled. He sent two photos to her of the spill, including a document with visible classification markings (redacted from public view).
“Oh no oh no,” Michael responded to Nauta. “I’m sorry potus had my phone.”
Yet when prosecutors interviewed Nauta about the boxes, he tried to cover for his boss, Donald Trump. According to the indictment:
Nauta claimed he did not know how the boxes were kept and moved.
When asked if he was “aware of any boxes being brought to [Trump’s] home" Nauto responded, “No.”
When asked if he had any information about where the boxes were kept, whether they were stored or locked up, Nauta responded, “I wish, I wish I could tell you. I don’t know. I don’t — I just honestly don't know.”
Nauta was charged alongside Trump with conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements. And Michael’s testimony, texts and other records look pretty damning for him.
Nauta may have overlooked the fact that his lies would be exposed, not only by the video surveillance footage obtained by investigators, but by the evidence provided by others. If Nauta were represented by an independent attorney, that lawyer probably would be telling him now to cooperate. As it is, Trump’s PAC is paying for his lawyer fees, and he is likely getting very bad advice.
Molly Michael, witness from hell for her old boss
If Nauta’s credibility is destroyed by Michael, or if he independently decides to flip, that will further doom Trump. But as things are, Michael alone could inflict significant damage.
She was not only present at many major moments in the case, but she comes armed with irrefutable receipts. She has no incentive to lie, and her story has been consistent throughout. She did the right thing returning classified documents to the FBI the very day she discovered they had failed to find them in her desk at Mar-a-Lago. And she isn’t some defendant looking for a better deal because she has not been charged and has not done anything wrong.
Moreover, she withstood his pressure to obstruct justice on his behalf. She didn’t go along with his plans or requests, the way Walt Nauta, Yuscil Taveras (who has now retracted his lies before the grand jury and is cooperating), and a third defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, did. Instead of going along with Trump’s admonition, “You don’t know anything about boxes,” she provided detailed information to prosecutors, speaking the truth when three much older male employees of Trump spun lies on his behalf.
Molly Michael may have been someone Trump routinely bossed around, shouted at, and even ultimately asked to break the law on his behalf. But in the end, she may well help take him down.
Women frequently respond poorly to being bossed around and shouted at. How odd.
The pressure on Walt Nauta to flip just went to MAX. He has to see he is going to jail, and that trump isn't really helping him. Also, I hope Molly has a good security detail from the DOJ. I'm sure she's in extreme danger.