He was knowingly in violation of the Presidential Records Act in fairness- none of that material is his. It's all government property- so he has no legal defense for retaining those records regardless of classification. That's what started all of this to begin with. But that law itself has no actual punishment attached.
After you and I had our exchange about classification, I dug in a little more and did some more research. One thing that came up that feels silly to have missed in retrospect is that the statutes listed in the warrant were all created before our current classification system (which was developed by Clinton as a part of his pledge for more government transparency). It turns out you and I were both wrong. It's irrelevant whether the information was classified or not. (Though I suppose the Courts could decide classification levels are the appropriate, objective standard for what constitutes serious threat to national security)
For the Espionage Act (
793), all that matters is that he knew, had reason to suspect, or should reasonably have known that the information in his possession had the potential to seriously harm our national security in the event of unauthorized disclosure. Given he was THE original classification authority and that several items were marked as Top Secret or TS/SCI- it would be hard to argue he didn't meet that criteria. And as both of us know, TP/SCI stuff doesn't just "accidentally" get taken out of a vault.
For
2071 and 1519, even that doesn't matter. They apply to either any Federal government records (2071) or anything pertaining to a Federal investigation (
1519).
We don't really know what evidence they had for probable cause or much about the substance of the 15 months of negotiations and fighting over these records. Trump's big defense for 793 is likely going to be that he had no idea those TP & TP/SCI records were there. For the other two, it's likely going to be that he didn't know what was in those boxes and didn't understand that they weren't his to keep. But it's also
possible that there's enough evidence to render those arguments moot.
If a Judge signed off on a warrant though, and they've been in 15 months of fighting and ignoring court subpoenas, it's not going to be easy to pull that off. And being former POTUS- ignorance on the national defense issues just isn't going to fly.
And that's not even touching the fact that, by Trump's own tacit admission, he was in possession of records related to nuclear programs. The rules for how those have to be handled are set by Congress, and even when he was in office Trump had no authority to walk that information into an unsecure location, let alone to declassify it.
So I think the whole classification argument, while intellectually interesting and potentially relevant in some instances, is actually a secondary issue at best.
Originally Posted by Solkern
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