'The numbers are just crazy': Letter reveals Trump hoarded 'staggering' amount of top-secret info

Former President Donald Trump took hundreds of documents marked as classified and improperly stored them at his home in Mar-A-Lago, according to a review conducted by the National Archives, and a reporter who's been covering the criminal investigation expressed shock at the number.

A letter published by the former president's contacts with the National Archives offered the first official accounting of the materials Trump hoarded after leaving the White House, and The Guardianreporter Hugo Lowell reacted to the news on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

"Yeah, if you look at the numbers, they're just staggering -- 100 pages of classified documents, 700 pages -- the numbers are just crazy," Lowell said. "I think that gives us a counting and sensitivity of the documents put out in Mar-A-Lago. In January, they went back two separate times. The one thing that does stand out to me, the potential obstruction, and lays out the ways that the Justice Department had to go to get the documents. When you read that in tandem with the filing on Monday you see how the Justice Department made every effort to get the documents back. The fact that the documents were listed on the search warrant when executed at Mar-A-Lago, I think that's significant."

Trump has claimed that he has executive privilege to hold on to those documents, but Lowell said the former president appears to be standing on shaky legal ground.

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"No Supreme Court has said the president doesn't have the ability to execute the executive privilege. When the Supreme Court looked at Trump v. Thompson and didn't rule on that, they sent it back to the appellate court, and the appellate court originally said, 'Well, it's not executive privilege, it's just the current president's waiver counts for more than the former president's assertion,'" Lowell said. "Basically, the Trump team are looking at this saying maybe we can litigate this out all the way through 2022 and 23. I think that's what they're trying to do."

Trump ally John Solomon, a right-wing reporter who apparently had access to the classified materials, released a letter showing that “special access program materials” were recovered from Mar-A-Lago, and Lowell was baffled by the revelation.

"I think the document from the National Archives, which was recently released by an ally close to the president, so that is shooting himself in the foot," Lowell said. "But they tried to make the claim that some of the documents removed from Mar-A-Lago are subject to executive privilege. if you start making that argument, you get into the territory where you're saying well these are actually official government records and effectively conceding that, they should have remained at the National Archives. they shouldn't be at Mar-A-Lago in the first place. So you have this almost concession that comes out of this filing and, I think, only bolsters one of the statutes listed on the search warrant, USC-2701, which concerns government records."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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