Former President Donald Trump just can’t stop talking about FBI raid at Mar-a-Lagoadmitted on Sunday that the FBI had stacked the boxes but demanded the return of the documents because they were protected by executive or attorney-client privilege.
The statement added two new reasons to his and his supporters’ ever-growing list of reasons why the raid was illegal, inappropriate, fruitless, too. intrusive, no big deal or all year combination.
“Oh great! It’s been discovered that the FBI, in its now famous raid on Mar-a-Lago, took boxes of ‘attor-client’ privileged documents, and also privileged documents of ‘executive’, which they knowingly shouldn’t take,” Trump wrote on Social Truth on Sunday morning, nearly a week after the raid.
“By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!”
Trump and his members gave a reason at Rolodex to prove the president’s supposed innocence, many of which are less and less rooted in reality as they try to blame President Joe Biden and the Justice Department for a political attack.
“I like the fact that he’s continuing to talk,” former US Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC on Sunday. “I bet the guys at DOJ are too because he’s going through a bunch of potential defenses and as soon as one fails, he’s going to look for something new.”
Trump’s children originally claimed the FBI won’t find anything, and that Trump returned everything he was supposed to have earlier this year. Once the news came out that the National Archives know about additional materials still at his Florida estate, Trump claimed officials simply asked them to return and he would happily comply (despite Trump being subpoenaed). Trump’s lawyers then began to come up with ideas that The FBI gave evidence at the complex, only to come back and claim that Trump may have declassified — or was able declassified — document.
Other GOP representatives, along with Trump himself, have touted Trump’s declassification tendencies. Some have argued that Trump has a standing order to declassify everything he brings to the White House residence, and that Trump himself wrote how “it was all declassified”. No documents appear to support that claim, but that hasn’t stopped some officials from suggesting more.
Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official, said on Fox Business Network Sunday morning: “Here’s an important truth that most Americans lack: President Trump, as president in office, is authorized person unilaterally to declassify. “Literally, he could stand looking at the documents and say they are now declassified and that was done with decisive immediate action.”
It echoes the comments Patel made to Breitbart News last week, where he said the documents had been declassified but the signs had not yet been updated.
“Trump has declassified all documents in case of leaving the government that he thinks the American public should have the right to read for themselves,” he said.
He did not explain why Trump never bothered to release the documents nearly two years after he lost the 2020 election.
