Pleading ignorance may not be a valid defense for former President Donald Trump if he winds up criminally charged under the Espionage Act or for obstructing justice following a weekend rally in Mesa, Arizona, according to former Justice Department official and FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann.
The federal government's investigation into the 45th president’s handling of White House records is appearing more cut-and-dry after Trump took the stage over the weekend and admitted he was aware of the records seized by investigators when they raided his Mar-a-Lago estate in August, according to Weissmann.
Trump's Admission: "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 said on Sunday. “I had a small number of boxes in storage.”
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Why It Matters: "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 said Monday, according to a report from the Washington Examiner. On Trump’s admission to owning the documents Weissmann added: “those are incredibly damning statements that go directly to knowledge and intent.”
The FBI raided Trump’s Florida estate on Aug. 8 and in September information on the documents the government seized during the raid started to leak. Documents containing the military capabilities of foreign countries, including nuclear information, were confiscated along with highly classified information on U.S. operations. Over 300 documents have reportedly been seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago this year.
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, but Weissmann, a top prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller, believes Trump’s recent statements, while campaigning for fellow GOP candidates in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, may become Trump’s undoing.
“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," Weissmann said.
What's More: Weissmann also pointed to reporting by New York Times journalists Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman as proof of Trump’s knowledge of the documents.
In her new book “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” Haberman reported, among many other things, that Trump had a stark disregard for national security and the government’s designation of sensitive information.
"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 during an appearance on MSNBC.
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Photo: Courtesy of Gage Skidmore on flickr
