Trump attorneys ask House Republicans to bail him out of classified documents mess

Donald Trump's lawyers are asking House Republicans to bail him out of the Department of Justice investigation into his mishandling of classified documents, according to a report Thursday.

Trump attorneys Timothy Parlatore, John Rowley and James Trusty sent a letter to House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) asking for the GOP-led House of Representatives to take over the federal investigation, reported The Independent.

“[The Department of Justice is] not the appropriate agency to conduct investigations pertaining to the mishandling or spillage of classified material,” Trump's attorneys wrote to the GOP lawmaker. "[This investigation] is antithetical to the principles of a fair and impartial search for the truth.”

“[It is] abundantly clear through this investigation that the institutional practice and procedures within the White House for the handling of classified materials drastically differ from the long-established standard operating procedures employed by various agencies of the intelligence community as well as the U.S. military,” the attorneys added.

The Justice Department routinely investigates unauthorized retention or distribution of material related to national security, but the former president's lawyers asked for a "legislative solution" to halt the "ham-handed criminal investigations of matters that are inherently not criminal."

The National Archives had sought the return of those documents from Trump for months before the Department of Justice sought and then executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago home, but the ex-president's attorneys complained that federal investigators had misled the federal magistrate who granted the request.

“[The Justice Department] needlessly ratcheted up the adversarial nature of the matter, resulting in a waste of time and resources and a disturbing loss of public trust. This serves no legitimate purpose, as DOJ’s actions further erode constitutional rights while blindly compromising its own ability to provide a comprehensive account of what happened,” the attorneys wrote.

“From the inception of this matter, rather than working cooperatively to ensure the return of all marked documents and correct any procedural failures, the DOJ team chose a path of aggressive combativeness," they added. "In doing so, it compromised the evidence, constitutional rights, and, in many instances, the professional ethics of its prosecutors. It has sought to criminalize a civil matter, pursue an unprecedented investigation of a former President while bristling at transparency, and is desperately seeking to justify its abominable conduct."