'Leverage': Here's why Trump may have refused to return classified documents
On Tuesday's edition of MSNBC's "The ReidOut," former FBI agent Peter Strzok highlighted one of the most incriminating aspects of the investigation into former President Donald Trump's hoarding of classified information at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Specifically, Strzok argued that until the FBI obtained a warrant to seize the documents Trump refused to cooperate with the federal officials who were trying to recover them..
"We know he shares because this guy almost tweeted out major secrets," said anchor Tiffany Cross. "I want to direct your attention to the Iran missile tweet ... there was an image of the Iranian missile blowup, and it was exquisite intelligence, this is all according to a former official. And when they showed it to the president he said I'm tweeting it. And they essentially said, sir, we don't want to do it because people will understand our capabilities. His response was, I'm the president, I can declassify anything. That blows my mind, and I do wonder what exactly was Merrick Garland mulling over, because we've seen how he's been a threat to us for four years?"
"The president has the authority to classify and declassify things while he's in office, and what's critical, he's no longer in office," said Strzok. "He was not in office immediately following the inauguration on January 20th, so what you have to do is go back and look, and the biggest question in my mind is why did he have all the information? In the run-up you show former National Security Adviser John Bolton saying he thought it might be neat. In my mind, I would not be surprised, one, not just the material that the FBI recovered in the search warrant but those 15 boxes that the National Archives got much earlier in the year."
Strzok made clear he didn't buy that this was all simply down to Trump thinking it would be cool to have the information lying around at his resort.
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"I think there's going to be turn out to be, one, highly, highly classified information, but, two, things that aren't just things he found neat," said Strzok. "I would be surprised if there weren't things that furthered his business interest, things he could use as leverage over people, things he could use to settle the scores. The biggest question in my mind is why on earth, having been told repeatedly by so many people, that he steadfastly refused to turn these things over and instead carried them all away. You know, I hope DOJ is content now with the FBI that they have recovered everything, but we're talking about a massive amount of information."
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