The intelligence community should take over the ongoing US Justice Department probe into Donald Trump's handling of classified documents after he left the White House, attorneys in the employ of the former president have urged.
In a letter to Ohio Representative Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the legal team, including Timothy Parlatore, John Rowley, Jim Trusty and Lindsey Halligan, wrote that “a legislative solution" needed to be found by Congress." According to the letter, this was imperative to “prevent the DOJ from continuing to conduct ham-handed criminal investigations of matters that are inherently not criminal”.
“DOJ should be ordered to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this Committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate,” it read.
In August 2022, the FBI raided the Mar-a-Lago estate on the grounds that potentially classified documents, moved there by Trump as he left the White House, were at that location. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, arguing that his presidential status afforded him the authority and right to declassify any document he wanted.
In the letter dated April 26, the Trump lawyers let loose a barrage of shots aimed at not only the DOJ, but also at the National Archives (NARA) and at the Government Services Administration (GSA). They argued that their staff that had packed the boxes to remove documents from the White House and send them to Florida were responsible for a “stark change” from previously observed processes. Trump's predecessors in the Oval Office “had over four years to prepare for their departure upon completion of their second term, President Trump had a much shorter time to wind up his administration,” they stated.
“DOJ chose not to work cooperatively [with] President Trump’s team and instead chose to fuel the animosity though [sic] the inappropriate use of criminal investigative tools such as a grand jury subpoena on May 11 and a search warrant on August 8,” the legal team stated.
While they demanded that Congress wield its authority and order the Department of Justice to back off, they insisted that the solution lay not in "a misguided, politically infected, and severely botched criminal investigation."
From the outset, Trump has insisted on his innocence in the DOJ's Mar-a-Lago classified docs probe. The 45th president claims that during his tenure, he had the legal authority and right to declassify any document he wanted. “You can declassify just by saying ‘it’s declassified’ – even by thinking about it,” Trump said in a media interview shortly after the raid.
While initially all over the Mar-a-Lago story, the mainstream US media conspicuously lost interest in it once it was discovered that President Biden also had classified documents stashed around multiple locations, including the garage of his Delaware home next to his vintage Corvette, dating back to his days as Barack Obama’s vice president. Furthermore, the Democrats and the media found another bone to chew on - the separate case against Trump involving the alleged illegal payoff of a porn star ahead of the 2016 presidential elections. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in that case. The former POTUS was indicted in the porn star payoff case, but remains the clear frontrunner among Republicans for the 2024 race to the White House.