AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
- The Justice Department pointed out that Trump's court filings don't back up his claim that he declassified all the records found at Mar-a-Lago.
- Trump "seeks to raise questions about the classification status of the records" but didn't "provide any evidence" that they had been declassified, DOJ said.
- Prosecutors also previously noted that whether the records are classified has no bearing on if Trump committed a crime.
The Justice Department on Tuesday pointed out a key discrepancy in former President Donald Trump's legal arguments in the wake of the FBI's Mar-a-Lago search — none of his court filings back up his public claim that he had declassified all the government records seized in the search.
Trump "principally seeks to raise questions about the classification status of the records and their categorization under the Presidential Records Act ('PRA')," the department said in a new legal filing. "But Plaintiff does not actually assert—much less provide any evidence—that any of the seized records bearing classification markings have been declassified."
Indeed, though the former president has frequently said he had a "standing order" to declassify all the records that were moved to Mar-a-Lago, more than a dozen of his former aides told CNN they had no knowledge of such an order, and Trump's legal team has not made the claim in any of its filings.
The government "has not proven" the records with classified markings were still classified, they said in a Monday filing, adding that "this issue is to be determined later."
Trump's lawyers' focus on whether the documents in question were classified or not also misses the point; none of the three laws, including the Espionage Act, that he's being investigated for violating depend on the classificaton of the records.
This story is developing. Check back for updates.
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/WnmFQsr
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