Two Obama-era Department of Justice officials claimed Thursday that former President Donald Trump’s classified documents defense will fail in court.
Former Obama-era FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann and former Obama-era solicitor general Neal Katyal offered the stark assessment during an appearance that evening on MSNBC’s “The Last Word w/Lawrence O’Donnell.”
The assessment came after host Lawrence O’Donnell played a clip from a recent Trump rally. In the clip, the former president vehemently maintained that he’d done nothing wrong by holding onto boxes of documents after leaving office in 2017.
“I had every right to have these documents, personal belongings, and boxes. I had the absolute right to have ’em,” he said in the clip.
Responding first, Weissmann argued that Trump was wrong.
“As a matter of law, he is wrong. And it’s not even something he going to be able to say, ‘Well ok, maybe I’m wrong legally, but I believed I had that right,’ because there will be numerous lawyers, or former White House counsel, and his own personal lawyers telling him these were not his,” he said.
“And he had a grand jury subpoena that required him to return them. So he is going to lose on every front on both the retaining classified documents and on the obstruction front,” he added.
Katyal spoke next.
“I don’t think even Trump believes that this is a legal defense. I think this is a political defense. He’s throwing up a lot of spaghetti at the wall and hoping that that will delay the trial and cause enough doubt so that if, in 2024, he or some other Republican wins, they can just drop the prosecution. And I think that’s all that’s going on. This is a political game. These are not legal arguments,” he said.
He went on to explain why the defense won’t work.
“I mean, I suppose if Donald Trump got a love letter – and of course, this is a counterfactual hypothetical — but if he actually got a love letter from someone, that would be something that he could take home,” he said.
“But these kinds of things – nuclear secrets, military secrets, and the like – are absolutely the property of the United States. He will lose this argument in court every day of every week, which is why nobody, no real lawyer believes this,” he added.
The discussion came roughly a month after Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury in early June for retaining classified documents and obstructing the federal government’s efforts to recover them.
Ben Shapiro: The dangerous Trump indictment https://t.co/nJIckI4FyC pic.twitter.com/TMT1gsVf0i
— BizPac Review (@BIZPACReview) June 18, 2023
The former president has argued he kept the boxes because they contained personal belongings. While that does appear to be the case, the boxes also reportedly contained a slew of classified material, ergo the indictment against him.
Fellow 2024 presidential candidate Chris Christie for his part believes Trump was motivated to keep the boxes for an entirely different reason.
“I think it was purely ego. I think he could not and still cannot to this day deal with the fact that he’s the only person outside the state of Delaware to ever lose to Joe Biden, and he wants to pretend he’s still president,” he told CNN on Thursday.
“He wanted to continue to pretend he was president and show these things to people and say, ‘Look what I still have, look what I still know,’” he added.
Listen:
Republican presidential candidate and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie joins CNN’s @jaketapper to explain his theory on why former President Donald Trump wanted to keep classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home. Watch: pic.twitter.com/n4db72uiED
— CNN (@CNN) July 6, 2023
The remarks from Christie prompted a flurry of social media remarks, with Twitter users offering their own theories on why Trump took the documents.
Look:
some like their blankies
some like their teddy bears
some like their documents— Gregg L Peacock (@GreggPeacock) July 7, 2023
Trump kept the classified documents to use for blackmail and for bribes. It’s all about the money and power.
— Democracy Prevailed Biden 2024 (@DPrevailed) July 6, 2023
I still favor the answer that says, “It’s all of the above”. Ego, insecurity, deviousness, and there’s an element of well hey you never know when they might come in handy.
— Larry (@0311OpEssexman) July 7, 2023
He kept them as leverage. He knew without the protection of the Presidency his legal troubles would catch up with him and he wanted to use the classified documents in exchange for clemency. “Don’t put me in jail and I won’t leak what I know about Iran”.
— Carol Galiano-Iten (@carolgaliano) July 6, 2023
I appreciate Christie bringing it to Trump, but it’s the height of naïveté to think he stole & kept (to his legal peril) documents just because of his ego. The man is driven by ego, yes, but he is equally, if not more, driven by money & power. He’d sell Ivanka for the right price
— ☝️SoSayU (@sosayu3) July 6, 2023
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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