By Steve Neavling
Donald Trump essentially confessed to illegally possessing classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago home during a weekend rally in Arizona.
So says Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official and FBI general counsel who was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
“I look at this with my former prosecutor’s hat on, and the reporting from Mike and Maggie Haberman and the speech that you talked about that he gave over the weekend are really damning evidence because the typical defense for somebody like Donald Trump is what a CEO argues, which is ‘I didn’t know the details, I don’t have the knowledge or intent to have violated the law,'” Weissmann said on MSNBC. “Meaning, I didn’t know what was at Mar-a-Lago. I didn’t know the content of what was at Mar-a-Lago, and so I didn’t have an intent to illegally take or retain these documents. That would be what a CEO would probably argue and is typically what we see in CEO cases.”
Trump admitted at the rally: “I had a small number of boxes in storage at Mar-a-Lago guarded by secret service and my people and everybody, I mean it’s safe.”
Trump also said, “They should give me immediately back everything that they’ve taken from me because it’s mine, it’s mine. They took it from me — in the raid. They broke into my house.”
Trump’s admission, Weissmann said, made it easier for the Justice Department to argue that the former president knew he illegally possessed confidential documents.
“The trick is always how do you show that somebody like Donald Trump knew what was at Mar-a-Lago, and it wasn’t just his lawyers or underlings who knew the details,” Weissmann added. “Well, that he’s trying to engage in the art of the deal with respect to classified documents, and he’s saying these documents were all mine, those are incredibly damning statements that go directly to knowledge and intent, and you can be sure that the DOJ prosecutors are doing what I’m doing, which is listening to this, going, this is making it that much easier to prove the only element that it could pose any real difficulty for the Department of Justice in bringing a case involving the Mar-a-Lago documents.”
