Former President Donald Trump’s legal team turned over more materials with classified markings and a laptop belonging to an aide to federal prosecutors in recent months, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
[...]
The previously undisclosed handovers – from December and January – suggest the protracted effort by the Justice Department to repossess records from Trump’s presidency may not be done.
[...]
A Trump aide had previously copied those same pages onto a thumb drive and laptop, not realizing they were classified, sources said. The laptop, which belonged to an aide, who works for Save America PAC, and the thumb drive were also given to investigators in January.
CNN
UPDATE 02/12/2023:
Donald Trump’s lawyers turned over an empty manilla folder marked “Classified Evening Briefing” after the US justice department issued a subpoena for its surrender once prosecutors became aware that it was located inside the private quarters of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, two sources familiar with the matter said.
The previously unreported subpoena was issued last month, the sources said, as the recently appointed special counsel escalates the inquiry into Trump’s possible unauthorized retention of national security materials and obstruction of justice.
[...]
The folder is understood to have not been initially returned because the lawyers thought “Classified Evening Briefing” did not make it classified, nor is it a formal classification marking.
Guardian
I don't know. The word "classified" seems to speak for itself. But maybe that's just me.
The backstory the justice department was told about the folder was that Trump would sometimes ask to keep the envelopes, featuring only the “Classified Evening Briefings” in red lettering, as keepsakes after briefings were delivered, one of the sources said.
A reminder of how important he was.
Around the same time that Trump’s lawyers turned over the empty folder – earlier reported by CNN - they also returned in December a box of presidential schedules at Mar-a-Lago of which a couple were marked as classified, and in January, a laptop on to which the contents of the box had been scanned last year by a junior aide.
The mishandling of those materials appears to have been inadvertent.
Whatever.
The junior Trump aide, according to what one of the sources said, was apparently instructed to upload the documents by top Trump aide Molly Michael to create a repository of what Trump was doing while in office and was apparently careless in scanning them on to her work laptop.
Always blame a flunky.
When the Trump legal team told the justice department about the uploads, federal prosecutors demanded the laptop and its password, warning that they would otherwise move to obtain a grand jury subpoena summoning the junior aide to Washington to grant them access to the computer.
To avoid a subpoena, the Trump legal team agreed to turn over the laptop in its entirety last month, though they did not allow federal prosecutors to collect it from Mar-a-Lago.
[...]
“This is nothing more than a politically-motivated witch-hunt against President Trump,” a spokesman for Trump said in a statement. “The weaponized Department of Injustice has shown no regard for common decency and key rules that govern the legal system.”
That sounds like something Trump would say. Department of Injustice. And could we have an explication of what "key rules" govern the legal system that the DOJ is disregarding?
No comments:
Post a Comment