by WorldTribune Staff, May 1, 2023
The legal team representing former President Donald Trump alleged on Wednesday that the Department of Justice has misled the courts and the public about how classified documents ended up at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
In a letter to Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence, Trump’s legal team accused the DOJ of aggressively pursuing the case despite the fact that Trump offered to let FBI agents search for records at Mar-a-Lago with no need for a raid.
“From the inception of this matter, rather than working cooperatively to ensure the return of all marked documents and correct any procedural failures, the DOJ team chose a path of aggressive combativeness,” the lawyers wrote. “In doing so, it compromised the evidence, constitutional rights, and, in many instances, the professional ethics of its prosecutors.”
The DOJ “utterly failed to make an accurate presentation to the Magistrate Judge, thereby violating President Trump’s constitutional rights against an unreasonable search and seizure,” the lawyers allege. “DOJ likely concealed from the Judge that President Trump had offered his cooperation or that the DOJ team could have pursued a consensual search, as President Trump had essentially invited them to do.”
Trump’s lawyers said the unprecedented FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August of last year was unnecessary and shielded Congress from being alerted to a lax National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) security system that boxed up classified documents with mementos and shipped them to the Mar-a-Lago without regard to protecting national secrets.
As Trump was contesting the 2020 election results, his White House pack-up was done quickly compared to prior presidents. His legal team sought to shift much of the blame to NARA, alleging the nation’s historical records repository treated the 45th president differently than other past chief executives.
“Whether NARA’s departure from routine pack-out procedures for President Trump was intentional or a product of the compressed timeline, it did not take custody of the documents and this made necessary the transfer of boxes of documents to President Trump’s heavily secured home at Mar-a-Lago,” the lawyers argued. “To be clear, had NARA offered President Trump the same assistance that it had provided to all previous Presidents, he would have accepted the offer and there would have been no reason to transfer the documents to Mar-a-Lago.”
The lawyers asked Congress to intervene in the dispute over the documents.
“The solution to these issues is not a misguided, politically infected, and severely botched criminal investigation, but rather a legislative solution,” Trump attorney attorney Timothy Parlatore and his colleagues wrote Turner. “DOJ should be ordered to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this Committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate.”
The letter continued: “Our review of the boxes at NARA shows that White House institutional practices for the handling of classified materials — including declassification procedures — are inconsistent with how the intelligence community and military handles classified materials. This is indicative of the staff’s packing processes and not any criminal intent by President Trump.”
The contents of boxes of White House documents shipped to Mar-a-Lago provided prima facie proof that storage of classified documents at the White House and their transmission to Florida were haphazard, the lawyers said.
“The boxes contain all manner of documents from the White House, are loosely grouped by date, and include newspapers, magazines, notes, letters, and daily schedules,” according to the letter. “Following its review of the materials, NARA inserted placeholder pages where it had removed documents with classification markings.”
The Trump lawyers’ review found the “vast majority of the placeholder inserts refer to briefings for phone calls with foreign leaders that were located near the schedule for those calls. This organization of materials (i.e., schedule of calls for the day, insert page for briefing sheet to prepare for the call, newspapers from the same day) indicates that the White House staff simply swept all documents from the President’s desk and other areas into boxes, where they have resided ever since.”
The letter asked Congress to “make legislative changes” to:
• Correct classified document handling procedures in the White House.
• Standardize document handling and storage procedures for Presidents and Vice Presidents when they leave office.
• Formalize procedures for investigations into the mishandling or spillage of classified material, to prevent future situations where DOJ is inappropriately assigned to conduct an investigation.
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