The government’s filing today was an outrageous political document, not just the photo of the covers of classified material, but long-winded with self-serving allegations. For example, there’s a footnote about how the FBI seized the former president’s passports. After all, they assert, they were investigating potential violations related to national defense. The implication is that Trump was a flight risk. How absurd. But the FBI kindly returned them. The standing argument is ridiculous, in my view, as the issue is whether there are not just privileged documents among those seized by the FBI, but personal papers as well.
The DOJ attempts to turn this into the Rosenbergs’ case. The fact is that the search warrant resulted in finding 3 classified documents in the former president’s office desk. That’s it, as far as we know from this filing. The filing uses this as evidence that items were moved from the storage room. But the storage room is where they found the rest of the boxes, including several dozen more classified documents. They took the folder covers of the documents, spread them on the floor, and took a photograph, included the photograph in their political filing for the world to see. As I read the Espionage Act, this comes awfully close to the mishandling of such documents. Everything else was in the storage room (not the former First Lady’s closet). The government said it found several dozen additional classified documents in the boxes in the storage room (hence, the photograph). Could this have been as simple as an error by the lawyer who signed the certification? Notice, the lawyer did not sign a certification that he had firsthand knowledge. This is not an excuse, but a reasonable conclusion. Why would a lawyer knowingly lie to the FBI about classified documents in the boxes in the storage room, where the boxes remained up until the time the search warrant was executed, and assume no one would ever find out about them? It makes no sense. Based on what the government has disclosed in today’s filing, this is pretty much what we know.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and James Comey roam the planet freely, celebrated by the media, whose homes were never searched.