Former Trump officials are shattering a key Mar-a-Lago documents defense
When President Richard Nixon — rocked by the Watergate scandal and facing articles of impeachment — resigned in August 1974, it marked one of the biggest political bombshells in U.S. history. Yet Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks, the Washington Post's Carl Bernstein and others who lived through the Nixon era are the first to say that Nixon's legal problems pale in comparison to what former President Donald Trump is facing 49 years later.
The twice-impeached Trump is up against four criminal indictments — two involving his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, one involving classified government documents being stored at Mar-a-Lago, and one involving alleged hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels and charges of falsifying business records. And in contrast to Nixon's resignation, Trump is running for president again and is the clear frontrunner in his party's 2024 presidential primary — leading Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the primary's second-place candidate, by 46 percent in a CBS News/YouGov poll released on August 20.
Special counsel Jack Smith alleges that Trump endangered the United States' national security by storing, at Mar-a-Lago, top-secret documents that never should have left Washington, D.C. Trump has maintained that any documents he had at Mar-a-Lago were declassified before he left the White House on January 20, 2020, but in an article published by The New Republic on August 21, journalist Tori Otten argues that two Republicans who served in the Trump Administration — former Vice President Mike Pence and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — have seriously damaged that defense.
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Otten notes that Pence, during a Sunday, August 20 appearance on ABC News, said, "I was never made aware of any broad-based effort to declassify documents."
"Pence was quick to add it's possible a sweeping declassification did happen without his knowledge," Otten explains. "But his comments match Meadows' testimony to Smith. Meadows told Smith's investigators that he does not remember Trump ever ordering or even discussing declassifying huge swathes of classified documents, ABC reported Sunday, citing anonymous sources. Meadows also said he was unaware of any 'standing order' to automatically declassify documents taken out of the Oval Office."
Otten notes that along with Pence and Meadows, "18 other" former Trump Administration officials "have said they knew of no standing declassification order."
"These officials include former Chiefs of Staff John Kelly and Mick Mulvaney," according to Otten. "Notably, Trump's lawyers do not mention a standing order in court documents because they could be penalized for making false statements."
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The New Republic's full article is available at this link.
