Trump undermines legal defence with admission about classified documents
Donald Trump may have undermined his own legal strategy by admitting classified documents were being kept in cartons in his country club's storage.
Trump took umbrage at a photo released by the Department of Justice yesterday showing the "Top Secret" documents splayed on the floor of his Mar-a-Lago club.
The former president posted on his social media page that it was the FBI who put his documents on the floor.
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Donald Trump's Truth Social posts have made his legal defence weaker. AP
"There seems to be confusion as to the 'picture' where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that's what the FBI found when they broke into my home. Wrong!" he wrote.
"They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big 'find' for them.
"They dropped them, not me."
His statement offers some indication Trump knew the classified documents were being kept in cartons in Mar-a-Lago.
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Many of the files kept in Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club were clearly marked as classified. Department of Justice
This is in spite of his lawyers telling the Department of Justice in June that all classified documents had been returned to the government.
It also undermines Trump's previous suggestion that the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago had been planted by the FBI.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said Trump's post was a "damning admission, not a defence".
"Trump is a criminal defence lawyer's nightmare," Weissmann said.
"His uninhibited mouthing off is actually serving to make the criminal case against him stronger."
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The FBI found many classified documents in a raid on Donald Trump's country club Mar-a-Lago. AP
Former solicitor-general Neal Katyal said the Department of Justice filing "makes clear this is not just about stolen documents, it's an active criminal investigation".
"And while it doesn't come out and say it, the target is one Donald J. Trump," Katyal tweeted.
"If this were any normal client, and any normal lawyer, we'd be talking about a plea today."
In a legal brief filed in federal court today, Trump's lawyers described the FBI raid as "unprecedented, unnecessary, and legally unsupported".
The brief also described Trump as "possibly a candidate against the current chief executive in 2024".
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A Secret Service agent stands outside of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, the day after the FBI searched Donald Trump's estate. AP
The legal brief itself may have damned Trump by conceding he was in possession of presidential records, which itself is a breach of the law.
Yesterday the Department of Justice said more than 100 classified documents were seized in the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago last month
Most were found in storage, but several were found in drawers in the former president's personal office desk.
The Department of Justice noted that it took the FBI mere hours to find twice as many classified documents among Trump's files than his own office had surrendered after weeks of apparent searching.
Trump has argued he had declassified every document in his possession, which a president has the right to do.
But he is yet to offer any evidence of that declassification, which needed to have taken place while he was still in office.
The photo released yesterday shows no markings on the documents which indicate they had been declassified.
Mishandling sensitive documents is a crime in the United States.
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