Former President Trump kept a familiar script at a campaign event held hours after he pleaded not guilty in federal court on Tuesday to 37 counts related to his handling of classified documents.
Echoing arguments he and his allies have made in news interviews, speeches and social media posts, Trump sought to paint the accusation as “election interference” and “political persecution.”
“I did everything right and they charged me,” he told supporters gathered at his golf club in Bedminster, NJ, on Tuesday night.
Since the former president revealed last week that he had been indicted, he and his allies have made a series of legal and political arguments, and many falsehoods have proliferated about the process. Some Trump surrogates have wrongly claimed that he had declassified the documents and therefore did nothing wrong, while others have said that while he did tamper with certain records, he is not the first to do so.
Trump also repeated his criticism of the Justice Department’s decision to indict him under the Espionage Act on Tuesday.
“The Espionage Act has been used to pursue traitors and spies,” he said. “It has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping his own documents.”
As stated in the 49-page indictment released last week, Trump is not being accused of being a spy. He faces 31 counts of willfully withholding national defense documents, as well as other charges, including obstruction of justice.
These are some of the statements made by the former president and his allies in recent days:
‘Political persecution’
Trump is the first former president to face federal charges, but President Biden is also in an unprecedented situation as the Justice Department oversees a case against the GOP front-runner who is trying to challenge him in the presidential election next year
Biden and the lawyer. Gen. Merrick Garland has said publicly that they have not communicated with each other about the case, and the president has refrained from campaigning on Trump’s legal troubles. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his supporters, including members of Congress, from falsely suggesting that Biden is behind the impeachment.
“If the president in power can imprison his political opponents, which is what Joe Biden is trying to do … we don’t have a republic anymore,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has a law. degree from Yale University and once served as Missouri Attorney General. “We don’t have the rule of law or the Constitution.”
Hawley went on to say that Biden and his “friends” were trying to “take out his main political opponent.”
Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury. To protect the integrity and independence of investigations into Trump ahead of his and Biden’s presidential bids, Garland appointed veteran federal prosecutor Jack Smith in November to serve as special counsel overseeing investigations into his handling of the ‘classified documents former president and his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
Last week, Biden was asked what he would say to Americans asking about the independence of his Justice Department.
“Never once, not once, have I suggested to the Department of Justice what they should do or not do, in relation to whether to charge or not to charge,” Biden said Thursday. “I’m honest.”
“As president I could have declassified it”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a Trump ally and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, insisted over the weekend that Trump had declassified all documents in his possession.
“He has said over and over again that he declassified all of this material,” Jordan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “This is the most political thing I’ve ever seen.”
The indictment alleges that on at least two occasions, Trump showed documents he acknowledged were classified to people who did not have security clearances.
In a July 2021 incident that the indictment says was caught on tape, Trump showed his editor and others what he called a “plan of attack” prepared by the Defense Department and said: “As president, I could have declassified him. … I can’t now, you know, but this is still a secret.”
There is no precedent for a president to claim that he has declassified something secret and is not bound by federal laws about its handling.
Asked if he had evidence that Trump had declassified documents before he left office, Jordan said: “I’m going by the president’s word, and he said yes.”
There is no indication that Trump has declassified these documents, and he has yet to provide any evidence that he has done so. The declassification process includes certain procedures, logs, and records so that the intelligence community knows what information is classified and what is not.
Some of the documents Trump is accused of illegally withholding detailed US nuclear information, which the Atomic Energy Act protects from being declassified. The act has never been challenged in court.
Espionage Act vs. Presidential Records Act
Trump and others have argued that the former president should not have been charged under the Espionage Act.
In response to the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the Presidential Records Act was enacted in 1978 to prevent past and future presidents and members of the executive branch from destroying or maintaining records created by or for them as part of his White House Papers. For example, he notes that a president scribbling in the margins of a memo would normally be considered a presidential record, while a letter or email to a spouse would be personal.
Trump has claimed that the documents at issue in the case are personal records. The accusation paints a different picture. The 31 classified documents found in his possession include secret and top secret documents, such as intelligence meetings on foreign countries and information on US and other countries’ military operations and capabilities.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has backed Trump’s re-election bid, said he believes the president has been overcharged.
“Trump whether you like him or not, he did not commit espionage,” Graham said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “He did not leak, leak or provide information to a foreign power or news organization to harm this country.”
The Justice Department has not cited the Presidential Records Act in this case. Instead, he has argued that the documents are not presidential records, but government records that belong to the intelligence agency that created them.
The Espionage Act addresses the disclosure and handling of classified information and says that any person who has “unauthorized possession” of national defense information and “voluntarily retains it and does not release it to the officer or employee of the States United with the right to receive it”. has broken the law.
Biden and the Clintons
Several Trump allies have said his legal troubles are fueled by politics. As Trump slammed the current administration on Tuesday and accused Biden of being corrupt, Fox News showed a chiron calling the current president a “would-be dictator.”
Others have said they believe Trump is being investigated for actions others have taken without consequence.
“We all know there is uneven application of the law here,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Florida, told reporters on Capitol Hill this week.
Donalds referenced former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email practices, classified documents found in Biden’s possession and a 2010 case involving taped conversations with former President Bill Clinton.
While all the cases deal with records, there are differences between them and Trump’s case.
The FBI investigated Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in 2016. In November 2016, two days before the election that Clinton would lose to Trump, former FBI Director James Comey closed the investigation without recommending charges.
But he criticized Clinton for being “extremely sloppy” and said hostile actors could have accessed the server. Comey laid out several factors that would have supported criminal charges, including “clearly intentional and deliberate mishandling of classified information” and “efforts to obstruct justice,” and said they did not apply to his case.
Many of the documents found on Clinton’s email server had been classified after they were received. And at the time, the unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents, a different crime than the one Trump has been charged with, was only a misdemeanor. (A law 2018 signed by Trump changed it to a felony.)
After the news broke this Biden’s personal lawyers had found classified documents in his possession earlier this year, including a the garage of his house in Delaware, Atty. General Garland appointed Robert Hur, a former U.S. attorney appointed by Trump, as special counsel to investigate whether Biden had mishandled classified documents. Biden’s the team has cooperated with the Department of Justice, and the investigation of Hur is ongoing.
In 2010, the conservative legal group Judicial Watch sued the National Archives for a set of 79 audio tapes of a historian’s interviews with former President Clinton while he was in office.
Judicial Watch argued that the tapes, which Clinton kept after leaving the White House, were presidential records that should have been turned over to the National Archives under the Presidential Records Act, claiming they captured official business . Clinton had designated the tapes, which were recorded to be part of an oral history, as personal records.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the National Archives did not have the power to change the designation of the tapes or compel the former president to produce them. Instead, this power rested with the president during his term.
Trump and his allies have seized on the case, both as an example of a perceived double standard and as a legal precedent they say should apply to Trump as well.
“Not only was Bill Clinton not even considered for criminal prosecution based on the tapes he took, but when he was sued for them, he won the case,” Trump told supporters Tuesday.
The issue in Trump’s case, however, is not whether the documents were personal or presidential records, but whether he retained documents related to national defense without authorization and whether he violated other laws, such as conspiring to obstruct justice, in the process
As Trump awaits his day in court, political rivals in his own party have begun to take a more critical tone with his federal charges compared to their reactions to lesser charges handed down by a Manhattan grand jury earlier this year. year.
“This indictment contains serious allegations, and I cannot defend what is alleged,” former Vice President Mike Pence said of the federal case this week.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department closed its investigation into Pence’s handling of sensitive information after classified documents were found at his home and voluntarily returned to the FBI earlier this year . No charges were recommended.
