![]() ![]() The argument Trump is making is related to a case of 79 audiotapes Bill Clinton made at the end of his presidency in preparation for a book and a lawsuit from a conservative group that alleged those tapes should be considered presidential records. The reason the Presidential Records Act has not been mentioned much is because it’s almost certainly not relevant to the case. The 31 charges for withholding highly sensitive defense information under the Espionage Act don’t hinge on whether any of it is classified, just on whether it’s “unlawful retention of defense-related information.” It seems there is no doubt it was defense related and it was retained.īut that brings us to number three, which is whether the retention of even these sensitive documents was illegal at all.ģ: LOOKING AT THE PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT He is charged with obstructing the investigation, hiding and lying about the documents after the subpoena was issued. ![]() ![]() But more importantly, none of the charges allege illegal retention of classified documents. So, whether it was still classified isn’t the point. One, the subpoena from May 2022 requested all documents with classified “markings” - not all documents currently classified. It’s true that as president, Trump could have declassified everything, and even though the argument that he actually did is a very weak one, it’s irrelevant in the context of this case for two reasons. Except that’s not what happened.Ģ: DID TRUMP HAVE THE RIGHT TO DECLASSIFY EVERYTHING? If the FBI wanted to help Clinton and hurt Trump, you don’t announce the reopening of the Clinton investigation right before the election and you do announce that the Trump campaign is being investigated for its contact with Russians. Most importantly, the FBI never leaked there was an ongoing Russia investigation of Trump, which would have significantly hurt his campaign. They protected her.” The problem with that is that James Comey announced 11 days before the election that they were reopening the Clinton investigation even though it turned out there was nothing new.įAQ: What we know about the Pennsylvania I-95 collapse That is what the law requires.Īnd to those who say: Come on, Comey and the FBI clearly had it out for Trump and not for Hillary Clinton. If you go through every piece of evidence as the prosecutors and the inspector general did, they didn’t believe there was evidence of corrupt intent. But the inspector general concluded: “There was no evidence that Clinton or anyone else intended to conceal, remove or destroy the emails from the government systems.” That is critical.īut what about the more than 30,000 emails, which her legal team deemed personal and deleted from the server at her home? In retrospect, it was a mistake to delete what they did. Prosecutors did not believe they could prove intent. Whether they were right or wrong (and I think it was very wrong to have that server), wrong doesn’t mean criminal. and foreign governments and even potential vulnerabilities to military attack for the U.S. nuclear programs to defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S. Plus, the witnesses from inside Trump’s orbit reluctantly testifying that he instructed them to hide and lie, and maybe most importantly, the documents themselves appear to have been the most sensitive types. I care much less about the photos of documents in places they shouldn’t have been, like ballrooms and bathrooms, and much more about the audiotape of him sharing highly classified plans for a potential military strike on Iran and admitting he could no longer declassify it. Now that the 49-page indictment is out, any fair reading of the allegations would lead to the conclusion that this is almost a legal worst-case scenario for Trump. So, the documents also needed to be more than just a letter to Kim Jong Un or something that was just technically classified. I have long believed if you are going to charge the former president of the United States, who is now a leading candidate again, the standard should be higher. ![]()
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