Mueller prosecutor explains why Garland will view the Trump document scandal as a very black and white issue
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace returned from vacation to walk through the ongoing scandal of the government documents Donald Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Speaking to Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department prosecutor for former special counsel Robert Mueller, Wallace asked about classified documents and distinctions on the criminality with the various classifications.
Weissmann explained that there have been frequent comments about the classification level of documents being unimportant because the Espionage Act doesn't require that the government documents be classified.
"And of course, the property exists whether the material is classified or not, but I also think it's largely irrelevant whether the documents were declassified by the president on the way out the door because the national security interests of top-secret compartmentalized information state the same whether the label had been taken off by the president or not," said Weissmann. "In other words, a rose by any other name still smells as sweet. It doesn't really matter whether he thought he could take a label off or not. The national security impact is exactly the same. And, I think, the internal DOJ perspective in deciding whether to charge this, I would strongly suspect that people like Merrick Garland or Lisa Monaco are going to see it that way."
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He also brought up the report that Trump's former top White House counselors, Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, were two of the seven people who were appointed to handle documents from his presidency with the National Archives.
"So, the fact that they were interviewed [by the FBI] makes total sense because this was the ball that they were tasked with carrying," Weissmann continued. "And I would imagine that DOJ reached out to the other seven people, which by the way, Mark Meadows is one. And in your timeline, the other thing I would note, is that in June of 2022, just at the time of the reaching out by DOJ, it appears that all seven were replaced by John Solomon and Kash Patel, and that was done by the former president. So, it was just a very interesting confluence. But there's a reason that those two people were interviewed by DOJ and I think that's again, just two of what I would strongly suspect is their attempt to try and talk to all seven."
When it comes to Cipollone and Philbin, they might not have the same legal exposure that Trump or Meadows did if they were trying to do the right thing, he explained. According to the previous reporting, both men were working to get some of the documents back from the White House residence that Trump took with him and get them to the National Archives to comply with the Presidential Records Act.
"This is not a hard call. Having been the general counsel of the FBI, we had to comply with the Records Act and we had a whole protocol in place and the director of the FBI, Bob Mueller, knew exactly what to do and comply with the rules. This is an easy one. This is not one where there's a lot of gray [area]. It is very black and white. These documents don't belong to the individual person and they belong to the government. It's not about giving them back. You turn them into personal custody, the former president and they're supposed to be given directly to the national archives. Which, by the way, pointedly the vice president said he did and had enough time to do."
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