[ad_1]
Donald Trump’s allies are enjoying the hits in a brand new key in a determined effort to shield him from legal fees for hoarding categorized paperwork: Blame Obama.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s The us First Prison is making the absurd declare that an Obama-era memo will have given Trump the impact he was once allowed to do no matter he sought after with categorized paperwork belonging to the federal government.
AFL claimed on Tuesday to have filed a Freedom of Data Act request for a memo signed in March 2015, following a Russian cyberattack on high-level Obama management officers the former yr. The memo established a committee referred to 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 ... different approach to learn the memo is that it lets in the president to do actually no matter she or he needs with categorized paperwork. Which is what Trump has argued as a part of his protection within the federal case introduced via particular suggest 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 of the United States has absolute authority over presidential papers.”
The group also argues that other counts in the indictment may be “baseless” if it can be proven that the documents Trump refused to hand over are still preserved on digital systems used by the Committee for Presidential Information Technology.
Essentially, they’re trying to spin the “exclusive control” phrase in the Obama memo into a legal basis to support Trump’s belief that he had “absolute authority” over White House documents.
To call this argument a “Hail Mary” doesn’t do justice to Hail Marys. This is a Hail Mary thrown from the 1-yard line, with your eyes closed, off your back foot, into triple coverage.
Because although Miller’s group may think it's found Trump a "get-out of prison loose" card, here’s what the Obama memo does not say: It doesn't say the president has absolute authority to do literally whatever he or she wants with classified documents. It also doesn’t say the president can hoard such documents in his personal loos and ballrooms after he leaves place of work. And it unquestionably doesn’t say he can spurn a couple of federal calls for to go back the ones paperwork or, allegedly, enlist underlings to assist him achieve this.
Turns out like Trump’s nonetheless at the hook.