How Trump's special master could respond to his claims
The speculation and preparation for what will unfold in Donald Trump's document scandal continued during Nicolle Wallace's "Deadline White House" on Monday.
Welcoming Mary McCord, former acting assistant attorney general for national security at the Department of Justice Wallace asked about the recent filing by the DOJ and what Americans should anticipate from the meeting with Judge Raymond Dearie, which is set to happen Tuesday. Dearie has been appointed the special master in charge of looking through the documents to see if there is any executive privilege or attorney-client privilege that should not have been taken by the FBI.
McCord explained that there is no indication that there are hand-written notes on the documents that would turn the stolen documents into Trump's attorney-client privilege.
"There's been no suggestion here that any of the classified documents are anything other than the original intelligence community materials generated by the intelligence community," said McCord. "And if that's the case, not only are they the government's documents but there's no possible way they could contain any attorney-client privilege or executive privilege information because this is original classified information generated by the intelligence community. And like I said, there's been no suggestion anywhere that there's anything else on there, handwritten notes for example, or notes between trump and his lawyers or anything like that on any of these documents. And that's something I think that the department would have revealed if that was in fact the case."
Judge Alieen Cannon seemed to accept the idea that the former president declassified everything prior to leaving office, which wasn't even asserted in the briefs by his lawyers. The theory it wasn't put in the legal statement is that there's no proof of that and declassification requires for the president to make a note of it. Some documents Trump couldn't have declassified unilaterally, national security experts have said looking at the evidence list and classification abbreviations.
David Laufman, the former chief of the DOJ counterintelligence section explained the classification and declassification details are irrelevant because the law doesn't specify which documents can be stolen based on classification. All documents that were created by the government, for the government belong to the government.
See the full conversation in the video below or at this link.
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