By Ashe O Washington August 31, : The US Justice Department virtually tore into former president Donald Trump for his statements in search of the documents that was seized in the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago (Florida) residence.
It came out swinging at the former President on evening Tuesday in an incredibly scathing court document that sought to prevent his access to his personal information returned after the Mar-a-Lago search, by declaring plainly that “those documents don’t belong to him”.
In the document of 36 pages the Department asserts that Trump does not have the ability to ask an federal judge to take over in and supervise the search of sensitive documents kept inaccessible at Trump’s oceanfront mansion in south Florida according to reports in the media.
With a defense team that was criticized for their incompetence, Trump waited a good two weeks following the FBI raid on his Palm Beach estate to sue and request an appointment by a judge as an “special master” to supervise the actions of federal agents of the documents they took.
On Tuesday evening the DOJ countered by arguing that the Presidential Records Act “makes clear” that the government “has total ownership, possession and control” of those documents and the former President cannot simply request them back – or decide what they must be done with.
Trump is currently being investigated by the FBI for his security and that of the nation at risk through his handling of “top classified” government documents.
Over the course of a whole year his office was in talks with the National Archives over the way he removed more than dozen boxes of presidential documents from the White House to his private estate instead of giving them to the nation’s archivists to ensure appropriate preservation, US media outlet The Daily Beast reported.
In recent weeks the imminent possibility of an unprecedented criminal prosecution of an ex-President has prompted his aides even famous Republicans such as Senator Lindsey Graham – to threaten the nation with violence, and possibly civil war.President Joe Biden has hit back at Lindsay Graham with an apparent tongue in the cheek: “Watch your back, we’re going to come with tighter gun control legislation.”
Trump filed a lawsuit against the federal government in South Florida federal court and US District Judge Aileen Mercedes Cannon demanded the DOJ to respond, resulting in the filing on Tuesday.The scathing arguments set out in the court filing that was signed by the top Miami federal prosecutor Juan Antonio Gonzalez and Jay I.Bratt the head of the DOJ National Security Division’s counterintelligence and export control division set the most aggressive stance by the DOJ yet against the former President.
From the beginning it has a direct impact on the disinformation and politicizing which Trump has been involved in through his public remarks on social media.This also influenced the lawsuit, with the DOJ declaring that it will provide “a thorough of the recitation of pertinent facts a lot of which are included to correct the erroneous and false narrative”.
For instance, Trump and his lieutenants like Kash Patel, a former White House aide Kash Patel have claimed that he had already classified mountains of documents, thus removing any suggestion that the documents were insensitive or improperly handled.On Tuesday the DOJ revealed that Trump’s lawyers had never said the possibility that none of the records in the 15 boxes Trump gave to the National Archives in January 2022 were classified.
ash/vd
