'This is insane': Legal experts take wrecking ball to latest Trump classified docs defense
March 14, 2024
Former President Donald Trump is in a Florida courtroom Thursday as he continues to get criminal charges involving retaining top-secret government documents dismissed.
Trump doesn't deny that he was in possession of the documents — in fact, he has doubled down on the accusations that he took them. But he defends himself by saying that they were "mine." It has been a point of contention between Trump and his lawyers.
Trump's new claim is that the documents from the White House were "personal" and he was entitled to take them home. The new ploy is a defense Tristan Snell, the former Trump University prosecutor, argued against.
MSNBC listed that the documents Trump took include "information about weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries, the U.S. nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies, and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack."
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"Who among us does not have these kinds of personal records lying around our apartments and houses?" said Snell, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I mean, I often have nuclear records stashed away as personal mementos. This is insane! So, I really feel like that argument — I hope that that gets treated with the derision that it deserves. I don't know that it will be, but I really hope that that's the case because that's just an absolutely insane argument."
Special Counsel Jack Smith is arguing that the records are indisputably presidential and thus are property of the United States government.
Indeed, some of the documents deal specifically with the Atomic Energy Act (AEA), and thus Trump would not have had access to such information without the presidency.
Former federal prosecutor Michael Zeldin, who also appeared on MSNBC, explained that personal items like a wrestling belt or other such things might be personal, but not documents and certainly not classified documents. While president he could have tried to declassify them, but that doesn't make them "personal" either.
Legal analyst Lisa Rubin, meanwhile, said she understands the "factual appeal" to the argument that such things were personal, but it doesn't make sense for documents that deal with national defense information.
"It may be that there is some vagary about what constitutes national security defense information, but the charges here that he's trying to dismiss, counts one through 32 of this indictment, involve classified documents," Rubin explained. "I think we could agree that any document that has a top-secret or S.C.I. clearance here, as many of these do, and all of them are some level of classification, are inherently national defense information."
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