'Too dumb to even play dumb': Legal expert says Trump is in deep trouble even if Iran document is lost

New reporting suggests that lawyers for former President Donald Trump are unable to locate the highly classified document detailing an attack plan against Iran that he was caught on tape telling people at his Bedminster club he possessed.

On MSNBC Friday, national security analyst Michael Schmidt said this could make the case harder to charge — but former Solicitor General Neal Katyal believes just the opposite.

"I have to say that classified documents about Iran are pretty high up on the list of things that you don't want to lose at a country club," said Katyal. "...This is not a hard case to prove to this prosecution. If anything, it's easier to make a case against Trump than it is against others. Trump is his own worst enemy when it comes to his legal troubles. He opens his mouth in all sorts of ways that implicate him even further."

"I don't think Mike (Schmidt) is right when he says the question here is whether or not they can find this document about Iran," Katyal continued. "Whether or not they find this document or not, that's not what the prosecution is going to be based on. The relevance of this whole story and this tape is not for the document itself. It's about — it goes to Trump's state of mind."

"The defense he's been articulating ever since the search on Mar-a-Lago is, I declassified this stuff in my mind. I had a standing order. I took stuff out of the White House. It was automatically declassified. Here he's saying, there is a document I took out on the White House, and that document is classified, therefore, I can't show it to you. That blows a hole in the defense."

"Whether Trump exerted incompetence with respect to that document or mishandled that document, that's an interesting question," added Katyal. "Prosecutors, of course, should get to the bottom of it. The real point is they found the goods. They found more than 100 classified documents in his house after they swore he didn't. And the one defense he's been articulating since the search is now contradicted by his own words. It's as if Donald Trump is too dumb to even play dumb, which was his defense."

"The analysis report being in The Times makes clear that Trump is on tape acknowledging that he had items that hadn't been declassified by him or anybody else," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "Could potentially blow a hole through all of the public defenses. That is Mike saying, yeah, there are legal defenses. It seems to always boil down to this stupid and chaotic defense, if the past is prologue. But what do you make of what is known to be — to be evidence that Jack Smith put before the grand jury?"

Watch below:

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