Defiant Trump responds to bombshell DOJ Mar-a-Lago court filing – and claims his possession of ‘sensitive information’ shouldn’t have been ’cause for alarm’ because he was president
- The DOJ accused Donald Trump and his lawyers of having ‘concealed and removed’ classified documents in order to ‘obstruct’ its probe
- Trump responded to their bombshell filing with his own 19-page response
- It comes after several angry posts targeting the FBI he made on Truth Social
- U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon set a hearing in the case for Thursday
Donald Trump has submitted a formal response to the Justice Department’s explosive Tuesday court filing just before his 8 p.m. Wednesday evening deadline to do so.
The ex-president’s legal team is hitting back at the DOJ’s arguments against appointing a special master to oversee the classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI during an unannounced search earlier this month.
It comes the night before a major hearing in the case on Thursday.
Trump’s legal team suggests they are entitled to be represented in a review of the documents seized, arguing that the government’s review of privileged information is too one-sided.
The DOJ’s 36-page Tuesday filing is a damning account of investigators’ attempts to recover classified documents that Trump improperly took home with him after leaving the White House.
It accuses Trump and his lawyers of having deliberately hidden records from investigators, claiming documents were ‘likely concealed and removed’ in order to ‘obstruct’ the probe.
In his Wednesday filing, Trump attempts to dismiss the very origins of the DOJ’s investigation by arguing his possession of ‘sensitive’ documents should not have been concerning for the National Archives – which first raised alarms about the ex-president’s handling of classified documents in January 2021.
‘The purported justification for the initiation of this criminal probe was the alleged discovery of sensitive information contained within the 15 boxes of Presidential records,’ the court papers state.
Donald Trump’s lawyers responded to the DOJ’s bombshell court filing on Wednesday night
‘But this “discovery” was to be fully anticipated given the very nature of Presidential records. Simply put, the notion that Presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been cause for alarm.’
Trump’s insistence that he has ‘declassified’ all documents in his possession is one of several defenses that he’s publicly floated – which at times have contradicted each other.
In the filing he also argues that his use of executive privilege ‘primarily benefits the United States’ and therefore should be honored.
After U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon signaled her openness to granting Trump’s request for a third-party official to review what the DOJ seized, prosecutors submitted a filing indicating that a so-called ‘privilege review team’ was engaged in much of the same work.
They argue that appointing a special master would be superfluous and potentially imperil their investigation given the highly classified nature of documents that were recovered.
But Trump’s Wednesday court filing calls the privilege review team ‘highly deficient’ and claims the DOJ presented an over-broad picture of its search in Tuesday’s filing – despite the extraordinary detail investigators delved into to reveal that they even went into the ex-president’s personal desks.
The Justice Department released a blistering legal filing Tuesday night that included a photo of documents seized during the August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago. Seen at right is a framed Time magazine cover
It also hits out at the DOJ for not including Trump in the filtration process. The criticism appears to be another attempt by his legal team to gain more insight into the ongoing investigation.
‘Left unchecked, the DOJ will impugn, leak, and publicize selective aspects of their investigation with no recourse for [Trump] but to somehow trust the self-restraint of currently unchecked investigators,’ the filing states.
The former president made clear on his Truth Social app Wednesday that his biggest gripe was with a photo accompanying the DOJ filing which shows documents strewn across the floor of his Mar-a-Lago office.
Some of the documents feature prominent red ‘TOP SECRET / SCI’ markings – a very high classification level.
SCI stands for ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information,’ which suggests national security information.
‘There seems to be confusion as to the “picture” where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my home,’ Trump wrote on Wednesday evening just hours before his new court filing dropped.
‘Wrong! They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big “find” for them. They dropped them, not me – Very deceiving…’
Trump’s Wednesday court filing slams the photo as ‘gratuitous.’
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