The Daily Populous Saturday August 20th, 2022 night edition
Authored by businessinsider.com and submitted by DaFunkJunkie

New legal documents were unsealed Thursday by a federal judge in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago raid.

They show new details about the possible crimes the FBI was investigating with the search.

They hinted at ways of prosecuting Trump that do not rest on whether documents he kept are classified.

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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 he declassified all of the documents while in office under the president's sweeping powers over national secrets.

But procedural documents unsealed Thursday by federal judge Bruce Reinhart, including the cover sheet of the warrant used in the search, revealed that this defense may not be as effective as Trump hoped, legal experts say.

One implication of the new information is that even if Trump is right about the documents being declassified, he still could have broken the law, Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law scholar, tweeted.

Prior to Thursday, 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.

Bradley P. Moss, a national security attorney, told Insider that the new documents "clarify but ultimately do not change much" of what we previously knew.

A striking detail, he said, is that the FBI believes Trump has obstructed its probe.

"Clearly, the FBI currently believes Mr. Trump not only took properly marked classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, but he kept them and resisted turning them over when confronted by the government," Moss said.

The FBI could theoretically use a charge of obstruction to pursue Trump, he said, even if the information does turn out to have been declassified.

Moss did suggest, though, that it is unlikely that prosecutors would choose to make that case, even if they technically could.

"I have no reason to suspect the government would pursue a charge if they concluded there was sufficient evidence the records were in fact declassified, as Trump keeps claiming," he said. "Even if the Espionage Act charge falls through, the government could pursue an obstruction charge.

"It is unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility, they would do so on its own. After all, our jails are filled with people who were caught up in charges lesser than the original aim of what law enforcement was investigating."

The affidavit underpinning the warrant would likely detail the grounds the FBI used in pursuing the warrant.

Reinhart said Thursday that he is leaning toward releasing the affidavit in a redacted form, because it contains sensitive information relating to the ongoing investigation. This could come as soon as August 25, the date of the next hearing.

Insider contacted Trump's office for comment.

His attorney, Alina Habba, in an interview on Newsmax, pushed back on the charges described in the sheet, saying Trump had cooperated with investigators and again said that he declassified the information.

Several figures from the Trump administration have described that claim as implausible or even "a lie."

habanero_sauce on August 19th, 2022 at 17:07 UTC »

I also believe someone had to tell him which documents to take home. I can’t imagine him sitting down and reading through classified files on his own and determining “yes these will be useful”

Prestigious_Run1098 on August 19th, 2022 at 16:42 UTC »

It's beyond me how anyone could still defend the man. Even Nixon defended our institutions like the FBI and the DoJ. The "Obama did it too" and "what about her emails" defense makes me chuckle.

AdmiralBarackAdama on August 19th, 2022 at 16:13 UTC »

It's only a matter of time before we learn he's already sold and transmitted this information to Russia or something

Edit: yes, Saudi Arabia too, of course