That IS one of the inferrances one might get in piece from Rule of Law by Murray Waas…..
Are there MORE stuff Trump has STILL not turned over?
Does some of his people KNOW that?
Have they lied to the Feds?
Will they get charged for doing so?
Will Garland charge Trump?
On the eve of Donald Trump’s last day in office as President, Trump sent a memo to his attorney general, and also the directors of National Intelligence and the CIA, directing them to declassify thousands of pages of highly classified government papers pertaining to the FBI’s investigation into the Russian Federation’s covert intervention into the 2016 US presidential election to help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.
But Trump was stymied in his efforts to make the records public, leading the outgoing president to rage to aides that the documents would never see the light of day.
Now, sources close to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation tell me that prosecutors have questioned at least three people about whether Trump’s frustrations may have been a motive in Trump taking thousands of pages of classified papers from the White House to Mar-A-Largo, in potential violation of federal law. One of those people was compelled to testify before a federal grand jury, the sources say.
The sources say that prosecutors appear to believe the episode may be central to determining Trump’s intent for his unauthorized removal from the White House of the papers. Insight into the president’s frame of mind—his intent and motivation, are likely to be the foundational building blocks of any case that the special counsel considers seeking against Trump.
Towards that end, the Special Counsel has zeroed in on conversations and communications between the Justice Department, the White House counsel, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, other then-senior White House aides, and Trump, in the final days—and even the final hours of his presidency….
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“It was very clear from what they asked that their emphasis was on Trump and Meadows,” one person said….
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The Justice Department’s ongoing investigation is not just investigating Trump’s unauthorized removal of the papers, but also whether the ex-president obstructed justice by lying to investigators about the records, or encouraging other individuals to do the same….
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Aside from [Kash] Patel’s comments that Trump took records about Russia from the White House, is of course, the confusing and elliptical language in Meadows’ memo, in which he didn’t say that all of the DOJ and FBI papers then in Trump’s possession weren’t returned to the Justice Department, but rather only the “bulk” of the records were…..
More on Trump file’s investigations …..
Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien has been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith in both his investigation into classified documents found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and the probe related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to a source familiar with the matter.
O’Brien has been asserting executive privilege in declining to provide some of the information that prosecutors are seeking from him, the source said.
CNN has reached out to O’Brien for comment.
O’Brien considered resigning from his post over Trump’s response to the violence on January 6, 2021, but ultimately decided to remain in the job, CNN previously reported. The National Security Council should have been involved in the handling of classified documents at end of the Trump presidency, and O’Brien may have knowledge of how those records ended up at Mar-a-Lago….
More…..