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Former President Donald Trump has offered a shifting array of defenses in response to the August 8 FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which uncovered a trove of secret documents.
Among them is the claim that they were all declassified by him while in office under the president’s sweeping powers over national secrets.
But procedural documents unsealed by federal judge Bruce Reinhart Thursday, including the cover sheet of the warrant used in the search, revealed that this defense may not be as effective as Trump hoped, per legal experts.
One implication of the new information is that even if Trump is right about the documents being declassified, he can still have broken the law.
That observation was made by Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law scholar.
Previously, the only information about the laws agents believed Trump may have broken came from the warrant itself, which was unsealed last Friday.
It listed broad federal statutes Trump may have violated, including the Espionage Act. More specific information was found in Thursday’s documents.
They showed that the FBI believes that Trump may be guilty of the willful retention of national defense information, concealment or removal of government records, and obstruction of federal investigation.
