By Jeremy Herb, Tierney Sneed, Kara Scannell, Holmes Lybrand and Marshall Cohen, CNN
Former President Donald Trump argued Wednesday in a court filing that the National Archives hoped to locate classified documents among the 15 boxes Trump overlooked in January from Mar-a-Lago because they were presidential documents.
The case, his last written argument before a critical hearing on Thursday, indicated that classified documents were found at Mar-a-Lago, but argued that it had not been alarming, and did not lead to the search for Trump. Residency in Florida earlier this month.
Trump’s new case Wednesday is his platform for officially responding to prosecutors’ claims that members of his legal team engaged in “obstructive conduct” by hiding documents at his Florida compound and offering false information to investigators about how many classified documents remained.
Presenting the investigation as politically charged given Trump’s potential 2024 candidacy, he scoffed at the concept that the Justice Department could simply “be tasked with evaluating its unwarranted pursuit of criminalizing a former president’s ownership of presidential and non-public records in a secure environment. “. “
The Justice Department said in court documents that the search was conducted after the FBI presented evidence that Trump’s team had concealed documents after claiming all classified documents were overlooked in June.
“The alleged justification for opening this thieves investigation was the alleged discovery of sensitive data involved in the 15 presidential records boxes,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “But this ‘discovery’ was entirely expected given the very nature of the presidential archives. Simply put, the concept that presidential files involve sensitive data has never been alarming. “
Trump’s lawyers argue that, under the Presidential Records Act, the files deserve to have been intelligently tracked to ensure the recovery of presidential records, rather than referring a fraudulent investigation to the Justice Department.
On Wednesday, in posts on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump claimed he had declassified everything in the photo.
“Terrible the way the FBI, the Mar-a-Lago raid, randomly dumped documents on the floor (pretending maybe it was me who did it!),” Trump wrote, “and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see. “Ideas that sought them out to remain secret?Fortunately I have been declassified!
The photos, however, do not show the most sensitive secret data, but only the main page of the secret documents, and there is no evidence that the documents have been declassified.
There are also no references in the 19-page dossier submitted for declassification on Wednesday. In one passage, Trump’s lawyers write that Tuesday’s Justice Department record included a photograph of “allegedly classified documents. “
The double court files are the subject of a civil lawsuit Trump filed earlier this month, as part of his bid to have a “special teacher” appointed to review documents the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago. Federal prosecutors oppose the request, saying it would impede the investigation of ongoing criminals and the intelligence community’s review of any national security risks, and the indictment would be dismissed.
If a special teacher was appointed, Trump’s record argued that “it would be appropriate for the special teacher to have a top-secret security clearance/SCI,” an implicit admission of high-level classification marks on documents.
He is scheduled for Thursday at 1 p. m. And.
Trump’s legal team said the government provides the special teacher and Trump himself with copies of the documents seized through the FBI.
The former president is also requesting a search warrant and an unredacted version of the documents used to download it, adding the affidavit issued last week in redacted form.
“The government provides the special captain and petitioner with a copy of the seized documents, a copy of the search warrant, and an unedited copy of the underlying application documents,” the file says.
The Justice Department argued that releasing the unredacted affidavit would undermine the ongoing federal investigation into the documents, adding witness disclosure. One of Trump’s lawyers said in television interviews that his team was seeking to know the identities of witnesses to the investigation. .
The Justice Department rejected Trump’s accusation that prosecutors maliciously turned a dispute over the toothless presidential records law into a full-blown criminal investigation.
Prosecutors said Tuesday in a court filing that “this investigation is not just about efforts to improperly maintain presidential records. “of government records and obstruction of justice.
Further rejecting Trump’s narrative, prosecutors noted that the federal law they cited on mismanagement of government records in particular criminalizes the concealment or deletion of “presidential records. “
Trump filed a lawsuit early last week, 14 days after the search warrant was executed, alleging his constitutional rights were violated during the search. He demanded that a special teacher be appointed to review documents seized through the FBI at Mar-a-Lago. A special teacher is a third-party lawyer who is appointed through the courts under certain conditions, in which law firms have been raided, to read about evidence received through the government and clean up privileged documents that must remain out of reach. . researchers.
After it was noted that several key legal elements were missing from Trump’s initial trial, the trial approval ruling in the case index, the approval opinion of the Trump-appointed trial on Aileen Cannon, asked his lawyers to supplement it with more data last Friday. On Saturday, he said in an order that he was capable of appointing the special teacher, but that he would first review court documents responding to the request and hear arguments on Thursday.
The Justice Department argued in Tuesday’s filing that the appointment of a special teacher would be “unnecessary” and a resolution that would impede the investigation of the offender such as threat assessment conducted by the intelligence community. Prosecutors argued that Trump did not cross procedural thresholds. required to make the request.
The Justice Department said Trump’s situation, a situation that focuses primarily on dubious claims of executive privilege, was very different from the conditions under which special teachers were appointed. In those cases, the documents covered by the attorney-client privilege are the primary concern.
In the past, prosecutors told the court that the search had recovered “a limited set of documents” that possibly covered the attorney-client privilege. the branch said Tuesday, and the rest of the documents have already been reviewed through officials handling the case.
Trump has attacked the DOJ’s internal evaluation procedure, which was approved by U. S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart when he signed the injunction in early August. This procedure “gives the clean privilege review team virtually out of control discretion to deal with potential privilege conflicts. “Trump’s lawyers wrote.
He said the 3 tactics that the Justice Department indicated the investigative team would handle the confidential documents were not “sufficient to protect the Petitioner’s vital interests, and it is not surprising that, as of this filing, the privilege review team made no effort to contact the Petitioner’s attorney regarding his decision-making. or the effects of the review of privilege. ‘
The case also presented new main points about how the special teacher works: main points that were missing from its initial move last week and the follow-up presentation that was filed last Friday at the judge’s request.
Trump’s dossier presented himself as the moderate actor on the occasions leading up to the search, describing the months in which his team postponed the administration’s efforts to download the dossier as a “standard exchange between former presidents and (the National Archives and the Archives Administration) regarding the contents of the presidential library. “
Fbi officials paid Mar-a-Lago to retrieve documents was demanded in a subpoena, in Trump’s words, “literally allowing him to have Justice Department lawyers and FBI investigators come to his home and give him safety advice. “
Read Trump’s dossier on Wednesday here.
This story has been updated in more detail.
El-CNN-Wire™