It also discards another potential defense. Trump’s own statement directly implicates him in the deliberate removal of the documents at issue. In a letter they sent to the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee last month, they claimed the removal of the documents marked as classified was a result of staff error and inadvertence.īut that no longer holds. Indeed, his lawyers had recently done just that.
It is a federal crime to “willfully and unlawfully … remove … any … document … in any public office … of the United States.” Indeed, the Justice Department has identified “improper removal,” or “unlawful” removal, as a key concern in court filings in the Mar-a-Lago litigation.īefore making that admission, Trump might have blamed the removal on his aides. With those fateful words, Trump admitted that he was involved in willfully removing the documents from the White House. You know, the boxes were stationed outside of the White House.”
When asked why he took government documents from the White House, Trump answered: “I was there and I took what I took. Where this case is tried can be the whole ballgame.
From the perspective of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s expected prosecution of Trump relating to the Mar-a-Lago documents case, however, to this constitutional scholar and former federal prosecutor, one statement stands out for a reason of criminal procedure rather than just substantive criminal law: Trump made an admission that helps secure Washington DC rather than Florida as the proper venue for the indictment and trial.
In terms of criminal law, among several self-destructive statements former President Donald Trump made in CNN’s “Town Hall,” the competition is stiff for the title of most damaging to his legal defense.
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