An attorney for Donald Trump appeared to dismiss the US Department of Justice investigation into the former president’s alleged mishandling of sensitive government documents as “mundane” crimes such as “espionage” and “obstruction”.
A damning 36-page filing from federal prosecutors on 30 August alleges that Mr Trump and his team “likely concealed and removed” documents in an effort to “obstruct” the government’s probe into whether the former president hoarded classified documents at his Florida compound after he left the White House in January 2021.
The search by FBI agents at Mar-a-Lago on 8 August uncovered classified documents inside his desk and more than 100 other documents stored in 13 boxes, some of which were marked “top secret” – despite a sworn document signed by his attorneys in June asserting that all documents were accounted for and had been returned.
Attorney Alina Habba appeared on right-wing personality Charlie Kirk’s programme on Real America’s Voice on 31 August, echoing Mr Trump’s claim that he declassified the documents and was in legal possession of them.
In a separate filing on Wednesday in an unrelated, long-running New York case – one alleging Mr Trump engaged in “fraudulent or misleading” business practices – Ms Habba asserted that she performed a “significant, diligent and comprehensive search” of “every room” of Mr Trump’s home, “including all desks, drawers, nightstands, dressers, closets, etc.”
She claimed in the filing that she searched his Mar-a-Lago home and office on 5 May and was “unable to locate any documents” related to a subpoena from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is investigating Mr Trump’s business and real estate empire.
That filing also includes a statement from Mr Trump confirming that he authorised his attorney “to search my private residence and personal office” at Mar-a-Lago, raising questions involving whether Ms Habba handled classified documents that wound up in the Justice Department probe, as FBI agents searched similar locations turning up sensitive documents, and if that could make her a potential witness in that case.
Ms Habba said on Wednesday that “what they did was try to criminalise Donald Trump, like they always do, they found these three mundane statutes – espionage, two others, obstruction – and they’re trying to claim there was some kind of criminal activity.”
Mr Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed that the former president had a “standing order” to broadly declassify documents, which legal experts have characterised as “total nonsense.”
“You can take a picture of top secret documents … and show the world a label, but if they’re declassified as he has a right to do, he has the right to have them,” Ms Habba said on Wednesday.
“And he was working together with [the National Archives and Records Administration], as we know, and that back and forth could have been at a table as they’ve been doing months prior,” she said.
The Justice Department’s filing on 30 August was a response to Mr Trump’s request for a so-called “special master” to review documents seized by the FBI on 8 August. Prosecutors argued that the former president “lacks standing to seek judicial relief or oversight … because those records do not belong to him”.
Prosecutors also said that many seized documents were so highly classified that “even the FBI counterintelligence personnel” and Justice Department attorneys reviewing that material had to be issued special security clearances before they could legally look at them.
The filing also claims that Mr Trump’s legal team prohibited investigators from “opening or looking inside any of the boxes” remaining in a locked storage room earlier this year, “giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained.”
Prosecutors wrote that a folder provided during that June meeting contained 38 separate documents marked as classified at levels up to top secret, claiming that attorneys for Mr Trump “offered no explanation as to why boxes of government records, including 38 documents with classification markings, remained at the Premises … nearly one-and-a-half years after the end of the Administration”.
