Twitter users suggested former President Donald Trump and his associates looked like they'd stepped off the set of HBO's The Sopranos or one of director Martin Scorsese's gangster movies after they were photographed having a meeting on one of his golf courses even though no one was golfing.
Trump's plane touched ground September 11 at Dulles Airport in Virginia. The trip was unannounced and was never announced on social media or otherwise. Trump arrived dressed in golf clothes.
Photos showed several individuals crowded around Trump on the green of one hole, no golf clubs in sight.
Kelly O'Donnell, the senior White House correspondent for NBC News, also posted video footage of the meeting taken from a "considerable distance."
The meeting came just after the Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered its agents to seize the phones of two top Trump aides and "blanketed his aides with about 40 subpoenas in a substantial escalation of the investigation into his efforts to subvert the 2020 election," according to people familiar with the inquiry who spoke to The New York Times.
The two men were identified as Boris Epshteyn, an in-house counsel, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who directed Election Day operations in 2020.
Emails reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who worked on the Trump campaign at the time showed that both men, along with multiple members of Trump's inner circle, conspired to help Trump overturn the results of an election that Democrat Joe Biden won decisively, one of the many developments in a larger story largely focused on Trump's actions on January 6, 2021, the day a mob of his supporters attacked the United States Capitol on the false premise the election had been stolen.
Emails were regularly sent to Epshteyn, who coordinated with people inside and outside the Trump campaign and the White House. Epshteyn was in regular contact with John Eastman, who openly planned to derail the certification of the Electoral College on January 6.
Epshteyn also passed along messages to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, even sending him the detailed plan Eastman had mapped out, but also handled "questions about how to pay Mr. Eastman and made the arrangements for him to visit the White House on Jan. 4, 2021," per the report.
Given these facts, Twitter users were remarkably curious.
Investigations into Trump's criminality appear to have intensified in the weeks since the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate on the hunt for classified documents that Trump took from the Oval Office.
The DOJ sought a search warrant for Trump's estate after "obtaining evidence that highly classified documents were likely concealed and that Mr. Trump’s representatives had falsely claimed all sensitive material had been returned," according to The New York Times, which broke the news about a recent court filing outlining what authorities uncovered during their search.
Agents found three classified documents in desks in Trump's office as well as more than 100 documents in 13 boxes or containers with classification markings, some with the highest restrictions. They are looking for still more documents after recovering empty folders with classified markings.
