Donald Trump And/Or His Incompetent Lawyers Are In Big Trouble For Lying To The FBI About Retaining Classified Documents

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Donald Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran,  drafted a statement which Trump’s Lawyer Christina Bobb (formerly an OANN TV host who promoted Trump’s stolen election lie and the Arizona “Fraudit”), who is said to be the custodian of the documents, signed. It asserted that, to the best of her knowledge, all classified material that was there had been returned, according to two people familiar with the statement.

All classified material had not been returned. The FBI is still not certain that it has successfully recovered all classified information.

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So there are two possibilities: (1) Trump’s  incompetent lawyers knowingly and intentionally lied to the FBI that all classified material had been returned, or (2) Trump’s incompetent lawyers relied upon the assurances of Donald Trump that he had produced all classified material without doing their due diligence before preparing and signing the custodian statement, which makes them accessories to Donald Trump’s crime of lying to the FBI.

Donald Trump and/or his incompetent attorneys are in big trouble for lying to the FBI about retaining highly classified documents after asserting that all classified documents had been returned, in violation of the Espionage Act.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann says the precedent here is the Paul Manafort case that he prosecuted. Mueller Says Manafort Lied to FBI After Guilty Plea:

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement with the Special Counsel’s office by “repeatedly” lying to the FBI and prosecutors during a recent series of interviews, according to a brief filed in federal court[.]

According to the three-page joint status report filed by prosecutor Andrew Weissmann in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Manafort violated terms of his plea agreement and “committed federal crimes by lying to the [FBI] and the special counsel’s office on a variety of subject matters” after a series of interviews with law enforcement.

In the status report, Manafort’s attorneys Kevin Downing and Thomas Zehnle defended the onetime lobbyist to the last. They said Manafort “provided information to the government in an effort to live up to his cooperation obligations.”

They “[do] not agree with the government’s characterization or that he has breached the agreement,” Downing wrote.

The New York Times, in an investigative report published on Monday night,  reports Trump Had More Than 300 Classified Documents at Mar-a-Lago (excerpt):

The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.

And the extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Mr. Trump left office, suggested to officials that the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators, or both.

Earler in the year in January, Trump Kept More Than 700 Pages of Classified Documents, Letter From National Archives Says:

President Donald J. Trump took more than 700 pages of classified documents, including some related to the nation’s most covert intelligence operations, to his private club and residence in Florida when he left the White House in January 2021, according to a letter that the National Archives sent to his lawyers this year.

The letter, dated May 10 and written by the acting U.S. archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, described the state of alarm in the Justice Department as officials there began to realize how serious the documents were.

It also suggested that top department prosecutors and members of the intelligence community were delayed in conducting a damage assessment about the documents’ removal from the White House as Mr. Trump’s lawyers tried to argue that some of them might have been protected by executive privilege.

The letter was disclosed on Monday night by one of Mr. Trump’s allies in the news media, John Solomon, who also serves as one of the former president’s representatives to the archives. The archives then released the letter on Tuesday.

The specific nature of the sensitive material that Mr. Trump took from the White House remains unclear. But the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.

Boom! There it is! Hands on knowledge of the contents of the classified documents, and his failure to return the documents upon demand from the National Archives establishes the mens rea for intentional retention of classified documents in violation of the Esionage Act. Charges are coming.

The highly sensitive nature of some of the material in the boxes prompted archives officials to refer the matter to the Justice Department, which within months had convened a grand jury investigation.

[T]wo former White House officials [White House counsel Pat Cippolone and his deputy Patrick Philbin], who had been designated as among Mr. Trump’s representatives with the archives, received calls and tried to facilitate the documents’ return.

Mr. Trump resisted those calls, describing the boxes of documents as “mine,” according to three advisers familiar with his comments.

Soon after beginning their investigation early this year, Justice Department officials came to believe there were additional classified documents that they needed to collect. In May, after conducting a series of witness interviews, the department issued a subpoena for the return of remaining classified material, according to people familiar with the episode.

On June 3, Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the national security division of the Justice Department, went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, and retrieve any remaining classified material to satisfy the subpoena. Mr. Corcoran went through the boxes himself to identify classified material beforehand, according to two people familiar with his efforts.

Mr. Corcoran showed Mr. Bratt the basement storage room where, he said, the remaining material had been kept.

Mr. Trump briefly came to see the investigators during the visit.

Mr. Bratt and the agents who joined him were given a sheaf of classified material, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Corcoran then drafted a statement, which Ms. Bobb, who is said to be the custodian of the documents, signed. It asserted that, to the best of her knowledge, all classified material that was there had been returned, according to two people familiar with the statement.

[S]oon after that visit, investigators, who were interviewing several people in Mr. Trump’s circle about the documents, came to believe that there were other presidential records that had not been turned over, according to the people familiar with the matter.

On June 22, the Justice Department subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage, which included a well-trafficked hallway outside the storage area, the people said.

[S]ome of it raised concerns for investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. It revealed people moving boxes in and out, and in some cases, appearing to change the containers some documents were held in. The footage also showed other parts of the property.

[T]he combination of witness interviews and the initial security footage led Justice Department officials to begin drafting a request for a search warrant, the people familiar with the matter said.

The F.B.I. agents who conducted the search found the additional documents in the storage area in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, as well as in a container in a closet in Mr. Trump’s office, the people said.

[At] the conclusion of the search this month, officials left with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified, comprising scores of additional documents. One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.

The Justice Department investigation is continuing, suggesting that officials are not certain whether they have recovered all the presidential records that Mr. Trump took with him from the White House.

Even after the extraordinary decision by the F.B.I. to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, investigators have sought additional surveillance footage from the club, people familiar with the matter said.

It was the second such demand for the club’s security tapes, said the people familiar with the matter, and underscored that authorities are still scrutinizing how the classified documents were handled by Mr. Trump and his staff before the search.

Under the Presidential Records Act, all official material remains government property and has to be provided to the archives at the end of a president’s term.

[No] documentation has come to light confirming that Mr. Trump declassified the material, and the potential crimes cited by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago would not hinge on the classification status of the documents.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has an excellent summary of the legal jeopardy for Trump amd his attorneys.

In a related matter, Trump’s incompetent lawyers have belatedly filed for a special master to review the documents removed by the FBI, with Trump still asserting “the documents are mine!” CNN reportsm Trump’s legal team asks for ‘special master’ to go through Mar-a-Lago evidence and determine if some should be returned:

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has asked a federal judge to appoint a “special master” to ensure the Justice Department returns any of his private documents seized during the search of Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago.

Trump is asking for a special master — a third-party attorney — to oversee the review of evidence gathered from the beach club in the criminal probe, and for the judge to pause federal investigators’ work related to the evidence until the review is done, according to a new court filing.

The new lawsuit marks the first legal filing by Trump’s team after FBI agents carried out their search on August 8 and underscores how his legal team has struggled to coalesce around a singular strategy. It has been assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020.
In the suit, Trump argues his constitutional rights were violated and that there may have been privileged materials seized.

Though the legal maneuver could slow down the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation, Trump’s request to the federal court in South Florida could face an uphill legal battle after his team missed multiple opportunities to challenge the search.

[T]he ex-President’s lawyers declined to take a position in court in the immediate aftermath of the search warrant execution. They also did not weigh in on whether the search warrant affidavit should be made public before or during a court hearing last week in West Palm Beach, Florida, even though one of his attorneys was present.

Trump, in the new filing, also asks for a more detailed receipt of what was removed from Mar-a-Lago. That request, if granted, would add to the two receipts the FBI already provided to Trump’s team describing 33 items seized, and which his attorney signed off on at the end of the search.

The Justice Department removed 11 sets of classified documents from Trump’s home, according to documents unsealed by a judge last week. The inventory shows that some of the materials recovered were marked as “top secret/SCI,” which is one of the highest levels of classification.

The department has already signaled that it is using an internal filter team to review the seized items, to separate material that could be subject to privilege claims. For instance, investigators mentioned the work of a filter team when they returned to Trump private documents that wouldn’t be part of the investigation, such as two expired passports and his diplomatic passport.

The Justice Department, in court documents, said it believed the evidence it collected at Mar-a-Lago will support its criminal investigation into the mishandling of federal records, including national defense material, after Trump’s team took boxes of records to Florida when he left office. The investigation is also looking at potential obstruction of justice in the investigation.

[T]he three attorneys who signed the motion are Lindsey Halligan, Jim Trusty and Evan Corcoran. The filing included a line about politics not affecting the administration of justice.

[In] addition to asking for a special master to be appointed, Trump and his lawyers used their lawsuit as a vehicle to re-air some of his years-old grievances about the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The suit blasted “biased FBI agents” and criticized key Russia probe figures — including Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Christopher Steele and Bruce Ohr, who all played a role in the early FBI investigation into the web of connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Kremlin.

Trump brought this up in the suit as part of his argument that the Justice Department and FBI are biased against him and that the Mar-a-Lago search was meant to derail his political career.

This is not going to turn out well for Donald Trump and his incompetent lawyers.





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2 thoughts on “Donald Trump And/Or His Incompetent Lawyers Are In Big Trouble For Lying To The FBI About Retaining Classified Documents”

  1. The New York Times adds, “Email Shows Early Tension Between Trump and National Archives”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/us/politics/national-archives-letter-trump.html

    Less than four months after former President Donald J. Trump left office, the general counsel of the National Archives reached out to three lawyers who had worked with Mr. Trump to convey a firm message: The archives had determined that more than two dozen boxes of Mr. Trump’s presidential records were missing, and it needed the lawyers’ “immediate assistance” to retrieve them, according to an email obtained by The New York Times.

    The email, sent on May 6, 2021, by the top lawyer at the archives, Gary M. Stern, was an early sign of tension between Mr. Trump and the federal agency responsible for safeguarding presidential records. It presaged the battle that would later erupt over the former president’s removal of scores of highly sensitive documents from the White House.

    On Tuesday, the archives released a separate letter, indicating that Mr. Trump had taken more than 700 pages of classified materials when he left Washington. Among them, the letter said, were some related to Special Access Programs, which are among the country’s most secretive intelligence operations.

    [This is a per se violation of the Esionage Act. Book him Danno.]

    [In] his email, Mr. Stern noted that there were two sets of documents in particular the archives could not find: the original correspondence between Mr. Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and a letter that President Barack Obama had left for Mr. Trump on his first day in office.

    Mr. Stern told the lawyers that just before Mr. Trump left office, the letters from Mr. Kim were placed in a binder for the president but never made their way to the archives, as required by the law. “It is essential that these original records be transferred to NARA as soon as possible,” he wrote, using the acronym for the National Archives and Records Administration.

    Mr. Stern’s email was addressed to Scott Gast and Michael Purpura, two of Mr. Trump’s representatives to the National Archives, and to Patrick F. Philbin, who served as a senior lawyer in Mr. Trump’s White House Counsel’s Office. Another official at the archives, John Laster, also received a copy.

    Mr. Philbin and Pat A. Cipollone, the top White House lawyer at the end of the Trump administration, have been interviewed by the F.B.I. in connection with the inquiry into the sensitive documents stored at Mar-a-Lago after Mr. Trump left office, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Aside from the letters from Mr. Obama and Mr. Kim, Mr. Stern also said that “roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records” that Mr. Trump had kept in the White House residence during his final year in office had not been given to the archives. In his email, Mr. Stern said the archives never received the materials even though Mr. Cipollone had determined that they should have been turned over, though it remained unclear what White House officials were told about the boxes.

  2. Jennifer Rubin writes, “Trump’s risk of indictment for his document snatch just skyrocketed”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/trump-documents-indictment-risk-skyrocket/

    When U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart initially indicated he was disposed to unsealing the affidavit accompanying the search warrant executed at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, former prosecutors and legal experts were surprised, to put it mildly.

    Now it appears we are unlikely to see much if anything from the affidavit — and for good reason. On Monday, Reinhart issued a ruling noting that “one of the statutes for which I found probable cause … prohibits obstructing an investigation. Also, as some of the media Intervenors have reported, there have been increased threats against FBI personnel since the search.”

    He therefore found that “given the public notoriety and controversy about this search, it is likely that even witnesses who are not expressly named in the Affidavit would be quickly and broadly identified over social media and other communication channels, which could lead to them being harassed and intimidated.” In other words, the MAGA campaign of incitement against law enforcement should weigh heavily against disclosure.

    Reinhart continued, “The Affidavit discloses the sources and methods used by the Government in its ongoing investigation. I agree with the Government that the Affidavit ‘contains, among other critically important and detailed investigative facts: highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government; specific investigative techniques; and information required by law to be kept under seal.’ ”

    Reinhart therefore concluded: “Government has a compelling reason not to publicize that information at this time.” Reinhart agreed to consider whether a redacted affidavit might be released, but his opinion strongly suggests that nothing significant would be revealed.

    While Trump has filed a preposterous lawsuit seeking a freeze on the examination of the recovered documents, he is unlikely to shift attention from this blockbuster revelation from the New York Times:

    In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, [multiple people briefed on the matter] said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

    The sheer number of documents previously recovered and their sources (from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency) raise the stakes considerably for Trump, undercutting his followers’ frivolous excuses and ludicrous accusations of an FBI plot to persecute him.

    Even more incriminating, the Times reports, “Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021,” meaning he was clearly aware of the contents and could view the classification markings. If the FBI and Justice Department are looking for evidence of Trump’s direct knowledge of the materials and willful refusal to return all of them, this would fit the bill.

    If, contrary to what Trump’s counsel said, the government did not previously get back all sensitive materials, the only logical conclusion would be that Trump refused to part with documents he falsely told aides were “mine.” This might be the rare case when Trump lacks even a hint of plausible deniability (e.g., the ability to shift blame to his attorney).

    If the facts are as damning as they appear, Trump’s risk of indictment is quite high. After the evidence is gathered, Attorney General Merrick Garland will need to decide whether to pursue an indictment from the grand jury. With a discrete set of facts that a jury can easily comprehend, powerful evidence of Trump’s willfulness and the clear interest in protecting the nation’s secrets, Garland will have every incentive to proceed — and surely not wait until the exponentially more complicated Jan. 6 investigation concludes.

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