'No chance of success': CNN analyst dumps on Trump gambit to kill classified docs case
Donald Trump prior to boarding Marine One on Oct. 30, 2020. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
February 23, 2024
Former President Donald Trump's attorneys made a new bid this week to get his indictment on willfully retaining top-secret government documents thrown out, but CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said he couldn't imagine Judge Aileen Cannon going for it.
On Thursday, Trump's lawyers tried to apply the same broad argument about presidential immunity to the documents case that they have tried to apply to the indictments against Trump for allegedly conspiring to defraud the United States by trying to illegally remain in power after losing the 2020 election.
"In addition to President Trump’s constitutional authority and DOJ’s established practices prior to this case, presidential discretion to designate records as personal under the PRA adds additional ambiguity for the reasons set forth in President Trump’s motion to dismiss based on the PRA," attorneys for Trump argued.
However, Honig explained why such an argument was highly unlikely to convince any judge.
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"The document since case, if you look in the indictment, that starts at 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2021, because it's not a crime for Donald Trump to have those documents until he leaves office," he said. "So how can he possibly be immune for crimes that happened after he left office?"
Honig then explained that it was one thing to argue that presidents couldn't be indicted for crimes they had committed while in office, but another to suggest that they couldn't be indicted if they committed crimes even after being out of power.
"I think the immunity argument on the January 6 case is already a stretch and likely doomed," he said. "We may learn today if the Supreme Court's taking that or not, but at least there's a colorable argument there. This one is a stretch beyond stretches and has no chance of success."
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