During his rallies over the weekend to boost MAGA candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald Trump made it easier for the Justice Department to bring a criminal case against him, a top prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller argued on Monday.
Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official and FBI general counsel who was known as Mueller’s “pit bull,” made the assessment stressing that Trump’s own comments bode ill for him as the federal government’s investigation into the former president’s handling of records heats up. He was making an appearance on MSNBC alongside New York Times journalist Michael Schmidt, who has reported several scoops on the documents inquiry.
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“I look at this with my former prosecutor’s hat on, and the reporting from Mike and Maggie Haberman and the speech that you talked about that he gave over the weekend are really damning evidence because the typical defense for somebody like Donald Trump is what a CEO argues, which is ‘I didn’t know the details, I don’t have the knowledge or intent to have violated the law,'” Weissmann said. “Meaning, I didn’t know what was at Mar-a-Lago. I didn’t know the content of what was at Mar-a-Lago, and so I didn’t have an intent to illegally take or retain these documents. That would be what a CEO would probably argue and is typically what we see in CEO cases.”
Trump headlined two rallies this weekend. At the second one, in Mesa, Arizona, Trump said the FBI should return documents seized from his Florida resort in August. “They should give me immediately back everything that they’ve taken from me because it’s mine, it’s mine. They took it from me — in the raid. They broke into my house,” he said on Sunday. Trump also denied committing any crimes.
Trump: I had a small number of boxes in storage… There is no crime. They should give me immediately back everything they have taken from me because it’s mine. pic.twitter.com/nSR2MjmAMk
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 10, 2022
And as reported by the New York Times, Trump tried to cut a deal with the National Archives and Records Administration to exchange boxes of material held at Mar-a-Lago for documents related to the FBI’s investigation of his ties to Russia. Although they never pursued it, Trump floated the idea to aides to try trading records later taken by the authorities for confidential documents he thought would exonerate him on Russia. Trump is being investigated under the Espionage Act, as well as related to laws regarding obstruction of justice, court documents show.
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“The trick is always how do you show that somebody like Donald Trump knew what was at Mar-a-Lago, and it wasn’t just his lawyers or underlings who knew the details,” Weissmann added. “Well, that he’s trying to engage in the art of the deal with respect to classified documents, and he’s saying these documents were all mine, those are incredibly damning statements that go directly to knowledge and intent, and you can be sure that the DOJ prosecutors are doing what I’m doing, which is listening to this, going, this is making it that much easier to prove the only element that it could pose any real difficulty for the Department of Justice in bringing a case involving the Mar-a-Lago documents.”
