On Tuesday, 45th President and leading 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to all 37 fraudulent counts relating to him supposedly “mishandling” classified documents from Special Counsel Jack Smith.
President Trump has turned Jack Smith’s frivolous federal indictment of him on its head as he cites the Presidential Records Act as a defense.
"Under the Presidential Records Act, which is civil not criminal, I had every right to have these documents," Trump said after returning from Miami during a speech at his Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey.
The Presidential Records Act is a 1978 law that allows presidents to decide what records to keep and take, regardless of what the National Archives and Records Administration thinks.
Trump is correct, as per usual, to use this act as a defense.
Senior Attorney Michael Bekesha, a man who lost a case against former President Bill Clinton for taking White House audiotapes when he left office and kept them in his sock drawer, explains Clinton was safe because he was a President who saw it fit to take the documents before his term ended.
"The same is true with Mr. Trump," Bekesha writes in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.
He adds, "Mr. Trump, like Mr. Clinton, took those boxes with him when he left office. As of noon on Jan. 20, 2021, whatever remained at the White House was presidential records. Whatever was taken by Mr. Trump wasn’t. That was the position of the Justice Department in 2010 and the ruling by Judge Jackson in 2012."
“SO NOW THAT EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS THAT THE PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT, PLUS THE CLINTON SOCKS CASE, TOTALLY EXONERATED ME FROM THE CONTINUING WITCH HUNT BROUGHT ON BY CORRUPT JOE BIDEN, THE DOJ, DERANGED JACK SMITH, AND THEIR RADICAL LEFT, MARXIST THUGS, WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO DROP ALL CHARGES AGAINST ME, APOLOGIZE, AND RETURN EVERYTHING THAT WAS ILLEGALLY TAKEN (FOURTH AMENDMENT) FROM MY HOME?” Trump wrote in a post on Thursday on his top-rated social media platform, Truth Social.
“THIS WAS NOTHING OTHER THAN ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” Trump added.
In an op-ed by former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on Substack, he concludes that a "[c]riminal indictment of former president has no legitimate basis."
“The bottom line is that if Mr. Trump or his lawyers allege — even without his testifying — that he declassified the documents, a criminal charge of unauthorized possession of classified documents will be difficult to prove. That doesn’t mean that a prosecutor could not get a grand jury to indict this particular ham sandwich. It does mean that it’s unlikely that a conviction against Mr. Trump would be sustainable,” Dershowitz writes.
“Based on what we know, we believe that there is no legitimate basis for a criminal indictment of Mr. Trump based on the material that was found at Mar-a-Lago,” Dershowitz concludes.