In May 2022, Donald Trump received a federal subpoena demanding all documents with classification marks that remained in his possession at Mar-a-Lago. At that point, SiriusXM talk show host Megyn Kelly suggested in an interview with the former president last week that he was legally required to turn over that data.
“I know this,” Trump responded, then immediately corrected himself: “I don’t even know that because I have a right to have those documents.” That surprising response epitomized the lazy arrogance Trump displayed in January 2021, when he removed thousands of presidential documents from the White House, and over the next year and a half, as he stubbornly resisted efforts to get them back.
In addition to the 32 charges of willfully withholding national defense information, this pattern of resistance resulted in eight obstruction-related charges, which may pose the most serious threat to Trump’s continued freedom. While the other three charges against Trump face enormous obstacles, including controversial legal interpretations, complicated stories and difficult questions about knowledge and intent, the story behind the documents case is relatively simple: Trump took a bunch of stuff that wasn’t his and refused to give it back.
Trump disputes both parts of that story. Under the Presidential Records Act, he told Kelly, “I can do whatever I want to do” with government documents, classified or not.
That’s a counterintuitive reading of the statute, which says, “The United States shall reserve and retain full ownership, possession, and control of presidential records.” These documents include any documents a president produces or sees in the course of his work, excluding material “of a purely private or non-public character.”
As Trump noted in his interview with Kelly, that law was a response to “Richard Nixon, because he kept everything.” Still, Trump insists the law doesn’t bar his similar assertion of complete discretion over the fate of presidential documents.
Even if Trump had a credible argument to that effect, Kelly noted, that did not give him the right to defy a federal subpoena. If Justice Department officials had asked him for the classified material at Mar-a-Lago, Trump insisted, “I would have given it to them.”
But that’s not what happened. Through his lawyers, Trump said he had complied with the subpoena by turning over every responsive document. That wasn’t true: During its Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago, the FBI found 102 additional documents marked as classified.
When Kelly pointed this out, Trump ridiculously claimed, “I just don’t know when” those events occurred. “All I know is that I can have those documents,” he said.
Trump could claim that he accidentally overlooked some documents with classification marks. But that defense would be complicated by conversations in which Trump allegedly suggested hiding the documents, his clandestine removal of archive boxes from the storage room that his lawyers were searching, and his alleged attempt to cover up that cover-up by instructing his subordinates to remove the security camera. film material.
Instead, Trump suggests he did not have to comply with a subpoena he claimed to obey. This doesn’t seem like a winning legal strategy.
Kelly also asked Trump about the top-secret Defense Department document he reportedly tossed around during a July 2021 meeting with two people working on his former chief of staff’s memoir. A recording shows Trump saying the “highly confidential” document contained “classified information,” adding that “as president I could have released it,” but “now I can’t,” so “this is still a secret’.
Trump later told Fox News host Bret Baier that there was “no document” – just newspaper clippings. When Kelly asked him to reconcile that claim with what he said at the time, Trump responded, “I’m not going to talk about that because that’s already, I think, very substantiated, and there’s no problem with it.”
Trump told Kelly he plans to testify in his own defense. For his own good, his lawyers should try to talk him out of it.
© Copyright 2023 by Creators Syndicate Inc.