Reacting to a report that the Department of Justice has taken possession of a laptop belonging to a Donald Trump aide which contained sensitive government documents, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig stated a new avenue of inquiry may open for investigators.
As CNN reported last week, "A Trump aide had previously copied those same pages onto a thumb drive and laptop, not realizing they were classified, sources said. The laptop, which belonged to an aide who works for Save America PAC, and the thumb drive were also given to investigators in January."
The report went on to note that the DOJ had subpoenaed Trump last May for all classified records in his possession, many of which were recovered at Mar-a-Lago during an FBI search of the Florida resort.
As CNN host Erica Hill pointed out, "Why would somebody who was affiliated with a PAC have access to those documents, have them on a laptop?"
"It was explained away as they didn't realize -- they thought it was just schedules," she continued. "In addition, there are legitimate questions about how the White House handles its transition -- that may be true, we're learning that. But based on everything we've learned about both what was discovered and the attitude toward it, could this trigger any sort of additional investigation or request for another search?"
"So to me, that new piece of information from [CNN's] Paula Reid is really important and, I think, really concerning to prosecutors and to the intelligence community because before we had these hard copy documents, we've seen the photos of them splayed out on the floor by the FBI during the search," Honig replied.
You are talking about pieces of paper, but now we know those pieces of paper were replicated electronically, scanned into a computer -- who knows?" he suggested. "Was that the only laptop, were they emailed, scanned, transmitted by any other way?" the former prosecutor asked. "Now the genie is out of the bottle and I think prosecutors have to figure out were they scanned, replicated, sent out any other means."
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