Trump wasn't endowed with a top security clearance despite protesting in court that he was, according to Jack Smith.
The legal smackdown was featured in a 67-page filing from special counsel Jack Smith's office attempting to "set the record straight" about the narrative of how prosecutors and authorities moved to bring charges against the former president for allegedly obstructing government in his attempt to hoard boxes full of White House classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
"Trump's team had been making noises about raising a defense that he somehow maintained a high level security clearance after he left the presidency, and Jack Smith's team today tried to make a very straightforward and forceful response," said former federal prosecutor Elie Honig during an appearance on CNN. "[Smith] said, 'A,' 'He did not have security clearance, we looked everywhere', and 'B,' 'If he did that doesn't let him take home possession of those documents."'
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"So I think Smith's team has put that to bed."
The filing laid out the measures Smith's team say they took to go through all the records and couldn't find evidence that Trump held a top level security clearance after he left office for Florida.
Trump’s attorneys maintain that the 45th president kept his security clearance from the Department of Energy (DOE, which handles the country's nuclear arsenal) and that it fortifies his argument that he was acting in "non-criminal states of mind relating to possession of classified materials" at Mar-a-Lago.
But Smith's team countered that with a memorandum from the assistant general counsel in Department of Energy, which stated that Trump's clearance only reached "Q" status which would be part of his “duties” as president, but that “Trump’s clearance had terminated upon the end of his presidency.”
The memo, according to CNN, admits that it appears Trump mistakenly wasn't scratched from the DOE dance, his term ended it was “belatedly updated to reflect that reality.”
“But even if Trump’s Q clearance had remained active, that fact would not give him the right to take any documents containing information subject to the clearance to his home and store it in his basement or anywhere else at Mar-a-Lago,” prosecutors wrote.
