It turns out the FBI and National Archives were warning Trump for a year that if he didn’t return the top secret documents he stole, he could be prosecuted. He refused and that’s what eventually triggered the search of Mar-a-Lago and the prosecution stalled in the court of Trump-appointed MAGA Judge Aileen Cannon. Why did he dismiss the warning?Was he selling the documents?
He promised he’d pardon one of his now-co-defendents in the case for helping him hide the documents. A summary of the FBI interview with that unnamed co-conspirator was released, with redactions, by Cannon on Monday. The witness, identified only as Person 16 [sounds like Mark Meadows], someone with a security clearance and daily access to the Oval Office, told Señor Trumpanzee that he should cooperate with federal investigators looking for classified documents, saying doing so could prevent him from being indicted. “Whatever you have, give everything back. Let them come here and get everything,” the witness said they told Trump. “Don’t give them a noble reason to indict you, because they will.” But the overly-entitled Trump was unfazed, according to the witness. The witness refused to have their conversation with the FBI recorded out of fear of reprisal.
Yesterday, Rebecca Beitsch reported that “The interview counters a defense from Trump that there was a standard order to declassify anything the former president had, with the witness saying they heard that for the first time only after Trump was facing charges…The witness also said they had urged Trump’s children to give him the same warning, noting that the former president ‘sometimes needed to be messaged the same thing from multiple people close to him. There are issues with the boxes. They belong to the government, talk to your dad and about giving them back’ the witness said he had told Trump’s children.”
The court documents were released by prosecutors to answer claims from Trump that he is facing a political prosecution and thus needs access to communications from special counsel Jack Smith’s team.
The filing says prosecutors must “clear the air on those issues … because the defendants’ misstatements, if unanswered, leave a highly misleading impression.”
“Their apparent aim is to cast a cloud of suspicion over responsible actions by government officials diligently doing their jobs. The defendants’ insinuations have scant factual or legal relevance to their discovery requests, but they should not stand uncorrected,” prosecutors wrote.
“Put simply, the Government here confronted an extraordinary situation: a former President engaging in calculated and persistent obstruction of the collection of Presidential records, which, as a matter of law, belong to the United States.”