Donald Trump’s fledgling attempt to get the Department of Justice to refund approximately $230 million in legal fees and damages for investigating his criminal actions doesn’t pass scrutiny and is built on shaky ground, reports MSNBC’s David Rohde.
From his perch as a regular on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the national security expert claimed that, regardless of how Trump’s former lawyers now at the DOJ respond, the president has no case.
Focusing on the raid at Mar-a-Lago where the former president was alleged to have illegally hoarded government documents, co-host Willie Geist set the stage with, “And so the president wants $230 million. One of the claims he's making is that the search of his home was somehow illegal. It was a legal search warrant executed by the FBI after it tried, literally for years to get these documents back through the national archives.”
“And finally," he added, “they had to resort to getting a legal search warrant. So does he have a claim here?”
“It seems to be an incredibly weak one,” Rohde quickly stated. “And what's so unusual is that it would normally you would want a judge to decide this. They asked for the documents back, the National Archives, again a long-standing law post-Nixon; the president's papers should go to the people. He denied having these things. They searched the house. Actually, before they searched the house, he said he'd given everything back to them. He had an affidavit his lawyer signed, and he said, ‘These are all the classified documents. Here's the last 35.’ They searched the house.”
“Weeks later, they find 300 classified documents — 300,” he emphasized. “And again, a federal judge approved the search warrant. [Trump-appointed judge] Aileen Cannon never found the judge who threw out the charges that the search was improper.”