This Sunday, former President Donald Trump called on the FBI to return documents they recovered at Mar-a-Lago that he says are are protected by attorney-client privilege.
Trump was referencing a Fox News report that the FBI seized information covered by attorney-client privilege during its search at Trump’s Palm Beach resort. The network also reported that some some of the material seized could be covered by executive privilege.
Speaking on CNN this Monday, legal expert Jennifer Rodgers said Trump's claims are a "red herring."
"Attorney-client privilege documents are attorney-client communications," Rodgers said. "So nothing that's classified at any level of classification and nothing that belongs to the government as a presidential record is going to be attorney-client privilege."
RELATED: Trump claims FBI seized his passports during Mar-a-Lago search: 'This is an assault!'
Rodgers went on to say they is any documents that were recovered do enter into that category, the government will put a "filter team" in place "to weed those documents out."
"So this is really a claim without any basis at all."
FBI agents recovered records marked "top secret" during their search of former president Trump's Florida estate, according to documents made public last week in a probe that includes possible violations of the US Espionage Act.
The warrant and related materials, unsealed by a Florida judge, showed agents took away with them a significant amount of classified files after the raid, which ignited a political firestorm in an already bitterly divided country.
The extraordinary search was partly based on suspicions of violations of the US Espionage Act related to the illegal retention of sensitive defense documents, the warrant showed.
Some of the papers were marked "top secret" and were "meant to be only available in special government facilities," said the unsealed seven-page federal court filing.
The filing contained a list of items removed from Mar-a-Lago, including information about the "President of France," and the warrant to search the palatial estate in Palm Beach.
Watch the video below or at this link.
With additional reporting by AFP
Attorney and former senior advisor to then-President Donald Trump, Eric Herschmann, has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury, after his explosive primetime testimony before the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack last month.
“A federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 attack has subpoenaed Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann for documents and testimony, according to a person familiar with the matter,” Politico reports.
Herschmann, who also defended Trump as part of the first Senate impeachment trial, famously attended the “craziest meeting of the Trump presidency,” a post-election Oval Office meeting during which he allegedly told conspiracy theory promoter and Trump loyalist Patrick Byrne, “Do you even know who the fuck I am, you idiot?”
In February of 2021, less than one month after the January 6 insurrection, Axios reported on that meeting, adding this exchange between Herschmann and Trump’s “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell:
“Powell, fixing on Trump, continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others. She named a county in Georgia where she claimed she could prove that [voting machine manufacturer] Dominion had illegally flipped the vote,” Axios reported. “Herschmann interrupted to point out that Trump had actually won the Georgia county in question: ‘So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?'”
Herschmann, who is also becoming known for his colorful language, says he told coup memo author and far right attorney John Eastman to “Get a great f’ing criminal defense lawyer,” on January 7, 2021, one day after the insurrection.
“He started to ask me about something dealing with Georgia, preserving something, potentially for appeal,” Herschmann says in his testimony to the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, NBC News reported. “And I said to him, are you out of your f’ing mind? Right? I said I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on, ‘orderly transition.’”
“Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life: Get a great f’ing criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.”
During the first impeachment hearing, Herschmann argued that Trump should not be convicted by the Senate, claiming he was no threat to the nation because his approval rating was high.
When FBI agents conducted a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, August 8, it didn’t take long for former President Donald Trump’s allies — from Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to far-right pundits at Fox News and Newsmax — to leap to his defense. Even when the Washington Post reported, on August 11, that FBI agents were searching for “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons,” Trump’s supporters continued to defend him vigorously.
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan lambasted Trump and his “apologists” during a blistering commentary on Sunday night, August 14, accusing them of pushing outright “lies” about the FBI search.
“The lies we have seen over the past week from the former president himself and from his political and media apologists about classified documents, FBI searches, nuclear secrets, Barack Obama and more, have been a sight to behold,” the progressive firebrand told viewers.
Trump has blamed the FBI search on “radical left Democrats.” But Hasan counters, “Democrats had nothing to do with it. The FBI executed the search warrant, and the FBI are not Democrats. If anything, like most law enforcement agencies, they lean to the right. The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, is a lifelong Republican, appointed by a Republican president. Wray has impeccable credentials.”
Hasan went to slam pro-Trump Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Fox News’ Jesse Watters, for claiming that the FBI agents planted false evidence at Mar-a-Lago during the August 8 search.
“To be clear, there is, of course, zero evidence the FBI planted evidence,” Hasan told viewers. “But they didn’t just go after the FBI. They went after the Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who signed off on the search warrant, casting him as an Obama donor. Actually, the judge is also a former donor to former Republican governor and son and brother of a former Republican governor and president, Jeb Bush. And as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported, the judge is also a regular guest on that well-known ‘liberal’ cable channel Newsmax…. The lies and evasions kept coming all week long.”
According to Hasan, the pro-Trump “lies” pushed by his “apologists” have contradicted one another.
“At one point this week,” Hasan told views, “Trump and Co. were telling so many lies that the lies started to just blatantly and hilariously contradict each other. The documents were planted, they said. But then, they also said that Trump declassified the documents. He declassified documents that were planted…. Then came the next nonsensical defense from Trumpworld.”
The “nonsensical defense,” Hasan noted, is that Trump simply took documents home to work on them after he declassified them.
“It is just not true to claim that the president can declassify whatever he likes. Nope,” Hasan explained.
Watch the video below:
\u201cThis is one of the longest monologues I've done for a while but do take out 10 mins of your time to watch:\n\nOn @MSNBC, I tallied all of the Trump/Trumpworld lies and excuses in the wake of the FBI search...and debunked them all.\n\nPlease do watch and share:\nhttps://t.co/gnN69Sdnox\u201d— Mehdi Hasan (@Mehdi Hasan) 1660527029
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