A late-night filing of legal briefs outlining previously unknown allegations regarding the FBI raid on former US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort revealed gaping holes in his expert, expert says version of events.
The US Department of Justice accuses Trump of obstructing its investigation to recover sensitive documents, taking the extraordinary step of releasing a photo of files marked ‘highly classified’ and ‘top secret’ which it says were seized from his home in Florida.
The DOJ says it has evidence that “government records were likely covered up and suppressed” and that “efforts were made to obstruct the government investigation.”
The deposits suggest criminality, but do not prove it. No legal action has been announced.
“The former president and several of his lawyers … have a lot of criminal exposure here,” Bradley Moss, a Washington, D.C.-area national security attorney, told CTV National News Washington correspondent Richard Madan.
“Primarily for making false statements to the FBI and NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration), as well as efforts to keep these records at Mar-a-Lago and conceal them from the government.”
Earlier this month, the FBI exercised a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, seizing numerous classified documents. Trump and his lawyers say documents discovered at the Palm Beach, Florida resort had already been declassified when he was in office.
However, legal briefs filed by the US Department of Justice documents indicate that this argument was never made during the months that NARA was trying to get the former president to return the documents, with the details indicating a new potential charge: obstruction of justice.
Moss, who deals primarily with government, military or intelligence community employees and has experience in security clearance disciplinary action, said he was blown away when he read the documents late last night.
“Boom! That’s what went through my mind,” he said. “Bomb. It was a complete gutting of Team Trump’s legal arguments.
He said that because the government was able to file documents about the raid itself, it was able to be more transparent with details the public likely wouldn’t have seen for months.
“The government was allowed to describe many facts that otherwise would not have come to light in this pre-charge phase of a criminal investigation,” he said of what is alleged in the documents. “They were allowed to explain to you many more details about how this investigation unfolded, what the issues were with the responses from the Trump team as they tried to resolve the issue with the tapes, and how the angle of obstruction came into play.”
The documents explained how the government learned that documents were being misplaced and repeatedly tried to have them returned, only to receive a portion of the missing documents each time.
“After they went to June with the subpoena and got the sworn affidavit from Trump’s lawyers saying that’s it, there’s nothing more, the government found evidence that there were in fact documents still on the property, located in areas other than the storage room,” Moss said the filings suggest. “And of course that’s what the warrant of search found.”
He said Trump “basically puts himself in these situations.
“It might have been considered a small mistake if, after learning that these documents were still at Mar-a-Lago, he had turned everything over to the archives in 2021. It would have been ‘no harm, no fault.’ But Donald Trump does not work like that.
The documents claim that Trump’s lawyers fought to delay the return of the documents, battling with NARA and the FBI for months, to only provide some of the documents when presented with a subpoena. . According to the filing, a lawyer for Trump said at the time that all documents were stored in a storage room and none were in a private area.
“Finally, it took a search warrant to recover the remaining 100 classified files that were in places like Donald Trump’s office in his home office,” Moss said.
“This is a significant criminal exposure. There are people who went to prison for less under the Espionage Act. And when it comes to obstruction, to what extent has Donald Trump lied to his lawyers? To what extent did the lawyers act irresponsibly or possibly lie to the FBI? This is the kind of information that we still don’t know for sure.
Although the criminal element is suggested, it is not proven in the filings and has not been tested in court.
Trump’s lawyers “absolutely” need their own attorneys now, he said.
“And as I’ve been saying for many years and others have coined it before me, ‘MAGA’ in my opinion stands for ‘Make Attorneys Get Attorneys’. He’s not the first Trump attorney to get in trouble. and it probably won’t be the last, but yes, if I was Christina Bobb, if I was Alina Habba, if I was Evan Corcoran, I would hire a lawyer now to protect me from potential criminal exposure, because they have all become important fact witnesses in this ongoing criminal investigation.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will be charged with obstruction – after avoiding charges in an obstruction probe linked to an investigation into whether his 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia.
“I am of the opinion, based on the information we already have, that Donald Trump could be, and in my professional opinion should be charged,” Moss said. “Although I don’t think that will happen before the midterm elections in November.”