Donald Trump’s allies are playing the hits in a new key in a desperate effort to defend him from criminal charges for hoarding classified documents: Blame Obama.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal is making the absurd claim that an Obama-era memo could have given Trump the impression he was allowed to do whatever he wanted with classified documents belonging to the government.
AFL claimed on Tuesday to have filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a memo signed in March 2015, following a Russian cyberattack on high-level Obama administration officials the previous year. The memo established a committee known as the “Committee for Presidential Information Technology,” consisting of White House staff and national security officials who were tasked with offering guidance to “maintain the President’s exclusive control of the information resources and information systems provided to the President, Vice President, and Executive Office of the President.”
A rational way to read that is that this committee was meant as a security measure to advise the president and top-level officials on maintaining control of documents so that authorized people could review and share them without unauthorized people, like hackers, accessing them.
One … other way to read the memo is that it allows the president to do literally whatever he or she wants with classified documents. Which is what Trump has argued as part of his defense in the federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
And of course that’s also what AFL is going with.
Although the federal indictment states that “Trump was not authorized to possess or retain [the] classified documents” after he left the White House and the feds asked for them back, AFL says the Obama-era memo “may have created a reasonable belief in President Trump that he, in fact, had such authority.” This, they argue, “is consistent with America First Legal’s whitepaper contending that the President…
Read the full article here
