Donald Trump on Thursday filed several motions seeking to throw out the criminal case he faces for allegedly keeping classified documents from the White House from authorities, but legal experts were quick to shut down the court filing.
The former president argued in part that he was immune from the case due to presidential immunity, not referencing the fact that he wasn't president at the time of the alleged misdeeds. Trump's former attorney and "fixer" Michael Cohen said the bid to dismiss the action was all about trial delay and fundraising.
ALSO READ: How Donald Trump is spreading a dangerous mental illness to his supporters
Legal experts were quick to rail against the filings online.
Regarding the motion seeking to dismiss the counts based on presidential immunity, national security attorney Bradley P. Moss said, the motion "is insultingly stupid."
"Trump is arguing he designated all these highly classified records as PERSONAL records, and that he therefore had the right to keep them," Moss said. "Even if that was a plausible argument, this is a motion to dismiss: he can’t introduce news facts."
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance also had a problem with that particular filing.
"The arguments are no more meritorious than the ones the court of appeals in DC already rejected," Vance wrote Thursday.
On the motion to dismiss for unconstitutional "vagueness," the security expert Moss said, "I also won’t waste my time with this one. Trump did the standard 'the espionage act provision is unconstitutionally vague' argument every EspAct defendant tries. It will fail. Just like the rest."
Secrets and Laws, an account that purports to be run by a former CIA lawyer, chimed in:
"If Trump really designated all the classified docs he took as 'personal records,' why did he return 184 of them to NARA & another 38 to DOJ in response to the subpoena? And then hide the rest from DOJ & his own attorney? And then attempt to destroy the evidence of all that?"
