Former President Donald Trump is doubling and tripling down on his innocence amid the left’s continued attacks on him.
In a flurry of social media posts published to Truth Social this Thursday morning, he stressed that he’s “as innocent as a person can be” but warned that his innocence may not be enough to prevent him from being prosecuted.
“Even though I am as innocent as a person can be, and despite MY campaign being spied on by the Radical Left, the FISA COURT being lied to and defrauded, all of the many Hoaxes and Scams that were illegally placed on me by very sick & demented people, and without even mentioning the many crimes of Joe and Hunter Biden, all revealed in great detail in the Laptop From Hell, it looks more and more like the Fake News Media is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done!” he wrote.
It’s presumed he was referring to the prospect of the Department of Justice (“the “sleaze”) prosecuting him (“something that should not be done”).
Democrat President Joe Biden’s FBI is currently investigating Trump over his possession of classified documents.
Trump and his allies maintain that he did nothing wrong in possessing the documents because he was the president, after all.
Indeed, earlier this week two attorneys, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, penned a piece for The Wall Street Journal arguing this very point. They based their argument on the Presidential Records Act.
They noted that the warrant used to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home earlier this month had “authorized the FBI to seize ‘all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519.'”
The problem, they continued, is that Trump’s possession of the documents was already covered under a superseding statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
“It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that ‘where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.’ The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.”
In an additional Truth Social post published Thursday, the former president seemed to make reference to this statute.
“The Radical Left Democrat prosecutors are illegally trying to circumvent, for purely political gain, the Presidential Record’s Act, under which I have done absolutely nothing wrong. It can not be circumvented, for me or any other President. They illegally Raided my home, and took things that should not have been taken. They even broke into my safe, an unthinkable act!” he wrote.
In a pithy third post, he simply wrote, “PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT,” as if to stress his previous point.
In another post, he questioned Biden’s feigned ignorance over the FBI’s raid of his Mar-a-Lago home.
“Joe Biden said he knew nothing about the Break-In of Mar-a-Lago or, the greatest political attack in the history of the U.S. Does anybody really believe this???” the former president wrote.
And in his final post, Trump slammed the Justice Department for all the ongoing leaking of information to the press. He also once again stressed his innocence.
“The Justice Department and FBI are ‘leaking’ at levels never seen before – and I did nothing wrong!!!” he wrote.
Not everybody agrees with the argument made by Rivkin and Casey regarding the Presidential Records Act.
Writing at Lawfare, Jack Goldsmith of Harvard University — which just hired former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, by the way — makes the case that the PRA doesn’t really apply to Trump anymore because he’s no longer the president.
“The PRA says that ‘upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, … the Archivist … shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President,'” he writes.
“More importantly, it says that the United States ‘shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records.’ The PRA also says that the archivist ‘shall deposit all such Presidential records in a Presidential archival depository or another archival facility operated by the United States.'”
Thus, the PRA “makes clear that only the United States (and not former President Trump) owns and is authorized to possess and control the presidential documents.”
My thoughts on the Presidential Records Act and Trump’s documents at Mar-a-Lago.
https://t.co/YvEQ7j8OA1— Jack Goldsmith (@jacklgoldsmith) August 24, 2022
However, Rivkin and Casey seem to offer a rebuttal to this in their own piece by noting that the PRA “doesn’t address the process by which a former president’s records are physically to be turned over to the archivist, or set any deadline, leaving this matter to be negotiated between the archivist and the former president.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
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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