Donald Trump has blamed the hit.
The lawyers of the former president of the United States requested that an independent expert review the documents seized by the FBI in the registry of Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach (Florida).
With this, however, they gave the Department of Justice the opportunity to fight back, to accuse him of hiding and moving secret documents and, in addition, to publish a photograph that speaks for itself.
Trump's lawyers have complained in a brief before the judge that the photo has been published without real reason only to cause a "dramatic" effect.
"The government's response gratuitously included a photograph of allegedly classified materials removed from a container and spread on the ground for dramatic effect," Trump's lawyers say.
In the photograph, the covers of title pages with documents classified as secret and top secret and with additional markings indicating even more restricted access can be seen with the naked eye.
Expanding the view, there are some dates and additional classification codes that intelligence experts emphasize that correspond to highly sensitive information and the possible identification of clandestine sources of espionage.
They are state secrets.
Photography is a blow to Trump in terms of image.
The former president himself has complained on his social network: “It is terrible the way the FBI, during the Mar-a-Lago raid, randomly threw documents all over the floor (perhaps pretending that it was me who did it! ), and then began taking photos of them for the public to see.
Did they think they wanted to keep them a secret?
Lucky that I declassified them! ”, He has written.
Curiously, Trump's lawyers have never used the former president's argument that "they are all declassified."
Perhaps they will recover it in the future, but it is a double-edged sword.
For one thing, he wouldn't free him from possible crime.
In a footnote on page 22 of the statement, the federal FBI agent highlights that the espionage law does not refer to classified documents but to "information related to national defense."
On the other hand, if Trump says he had declassified the documents, it is an implicit acknowledgment that he knew he had them, weakening the defense line that he inadvertently took them from the White House, as his lawyers alleged in another letter. prior submission to the Department of Justice.
additional details
But in addition to the blow that the photograph represents, the Department of Justice has also taken advantage of its response to give some additional details about the investigation that expose Trump and that support a possible accusation of obstruction of justice.
When the FBI special agent wrote the statement to justify the search, he was not thinking that it would be made public and could not separate what to tell and what not.
Afterwards, it was the Department of Justice that had to cross out hundreds of lines in which evidence, testimony and arguments were intermingled.
Now, Trump's initiative to request an expert witness has allowed the Prosecutor's Office to draft a new, more incriminating brief against the former president from scratch, measuring what he could tell and what he could not, without disclosing confidential information or compromising the investigation, but articulating a story more complete and coherent than the one that emerged from the report.
In particular, the Justice Department points out that when agents showed up at Mar-a-Lago on June 3 to enforce a subpoena issued weeks earlier by a grand jury to take any classified documents that were still there, Trump's lawyers They prevented them from checking the contents of the boxes in the warehouse where they were.
The subsequent investigation led the FBI to the conviction that papers with classification marks had been “hidden and moved” from that storage room and that there could be attempts to obstruct the action of justice.
The new document reveals that a hundred classified documents were found in the registry (until then there had been talk of 11 sets of documents, but it was not known how many they added up to).
That's more than double what Trump's lawyers turned over as a result of the June subpoena, even though Trump's lawyers testified that after a "diligent" search they had fully complied with the subpoena.
In their new brief this Wednesday before the judge, in addition to complaining about the photograph, Trump's lawyers insist that an independent expert review the papers and accept that it is someone with permission to review classified documents.
In addition, they question the origin of the investigation, which was to discover that in the 15 boxes that Trump delivered in January, a year after leaving the presidency, there were numerous secret documents that should not be in his possession.
"The idea that the presidential records contain sensitive information should never have been a cause for alarm," they argue as if it were a natural thing to have them at Mar-a-Lago.
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