Former President Donald Trump's attorneys are asserting the top-secret government documents seized by FBI agents last month are subject to executive privilege because the former president scribbled handwritten notes on them.
Via Politico's Kyle Cheney, Trump's attorneys made this argument in a footnote in their latest court filing in which they argue the handwritten notes mean that the documents "could certainly contain privileged information," thus "further supporting the need for an independent, third-party review of these documents."
Cheney also notes that Trump's lawyers' major argument is that the burden is on the Department of Justice to prove that the documents in question are still classified, even as they acknowledge that the documents were marked as classified at the time of their seizure at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.
"The government again presupposes that the documents it claims are classified are, in fact, classified and their segregation is inviolable," they argue. "However, the government has not yet proven this critical fact."
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Trump's legal team has so far avoided explicitly saying that the former president declassified the documents he brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, and is now arguing that it is the DOJ's job to prove that he didn't do so.
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