Ex-Mueller prosecutor points to glaring problem with Trump filing: 'Going to backfire'
Andrew Weissmann, former senior prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller's team, thinks Donald Trump's new filing claimed that he's being unfairly targeted for keeping classified documents at his home will flop.
MSNBC's host Nicolle Wallace explained that the critical part of the Mar-a-Lago documents case comes back to national security, and that individuals may have risked their lives to give the United States the information they contain.
Trump not only endangered that but, she said, he apparently didn't care and continued to claim the documents were his.
"When you think about what the election was about in terms of empathy being displayed by then-candidate [Joe] Biden and the lack of empathy with respect to Trump, it wasn't just sort of abstract principles that were being talked about or even with respect to just how they deal with people," Weissmann said.
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The lack of understanding about what leads someone to give classified information to the U.S. is what causes someone not to take their security seriously, he said.
"I'm not talking about making a mistake. That could be said by Mike Pence, Joe Biden," Weissmann explained.
Trump is claiming that, because Pence and Biden weren't prosecuted for their own storage of classified documents in their homes, he is only being prosecuted because of politics.
Wallace recalled the day of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and speaking to someone previously at the Justice Department, who conveyed that, "It had to be more than knowledge of possession. They had to have gotten p---ed that [Trump] didn't give them back."
Ultimately, Weissmann said that this filing by Trump is likely to backfire because there is an extensive email trail showing "that it was intentional for months and months." On top of that, there's also "obstruction."
"So, that lack of empathy is something that leads to this danger to national security, and I think that in terms of the reason for why you saw this extraordinary step is precisely because anybody in the White House or the executive branch would be thinking, our obligation to the public is to recover this," he explained.
Being criticized over it isn't important, the national security of the United States comes first, Weissmann said.
"It is one [of] the enormous ways it is going to backfire," the law professor told Wallace. "This is going to be denied, and it is going to be denied in a judicial decision; if not by Judge [Aileen] Cannon, she will get reversed."
"There is no way that this is going to be viewed as selective prosecution. He will say, ignore those courts, and, it's pretty hard to say that with the 11th Circuit [Court of Appeals]. Those are his people."
See the full conversation in the video below or at the link here.
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