On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s attorneys asked Congress to intervene in the dispute over classified documents. Trump’s legal team is headed by attorney Timothy Parlatore. Parlatore maintains that the DOJ misled the public and the courts regarding the sensitive memos that were at President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate.
Parlatore’s legal team sent a letter to Mike Turner, the current House Intelligence Committee Chairman, and also to the Gang of Eight, which is comprised of four members from the Senate and four members from the House of Representatives. The group is bipartisan, with 2 House members and 2 Senate members from each party. The group is briefed on intelligence matters by the executive branch.
The letter stated that last August’s unprecedented raid on Mar-a-Lago by the FBI was unnecessary and also shielded Congress from being alerted to a lax National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) security system. The letter accuses NARA of not being careful in its handling of secret documents, which can be seen in what took place. According to Trump’s attorneys, the group showed little regard for protecting national secrets when it boxed up classified documents and shipped them to the Florida compound. According to Just The News, Parlatore and his associates wrote,
“The solution to these issues is not a misguided, politically infected, and severely botched criminal investigation, but rather a legislative solution,
The “DOJ should be ordered to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this Committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate.”
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The letter went on to point out that during Trump’s transition out of the Whitehouse NARA refused to assist him in the way it had Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. According to the letter, NARA securely moved these records to temporary facilities that NARA leased from the General Services Administration (GSA) or the former presidents. But failed to provide the same help for President Trump.
The letter says that NARA’s refusal to help Trump was politically influenced and that when classified documents were found in Jimmy Carter’s possession, he was not subjected to a criminal probe,
“NARA, unfortunately, has become overtly political and declined to provide archival assistance to President Trump’s transition team. Interestingly, in its Press Statement, NARA cites every recent President after Jimmy Carter as having received the same assistance with “archival and security standards.” Yet, President Carter, the last President before President Trump not to receive archival assistance, found documents with classification markings in his home, which he returned to NARA (though apparently without an accompanying DOJ criminal probe).”
The letter went on to criticize the standards NARA uses when handling classified information, saying it fell short of how the military would handle secret documents,
“Our review of the boxes at NARA shows that White House institutional practices for the handling of classified materials — including declassification procedures — are inconsistent with how the intelligence community and military handles classified materials,” the lawyers wrote. “This is indicative of the staff’s packing processes and not any criminal intent by President Trump.”
The attorneys doled out harsh criticism to federal prosecutors questioning if they had worked with NARA to arrange a scandal while overlooking the loose protocols NARA used while handling the documents, which enabled documents to end up at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, both Joe Biden’s home and office, and Jimmy Carter’s facilities.
“Whether NARA’s departure from routine pack-out procedures for President Trump was intentional or a product of the compressed timeline, it did not take custody of the documents, and this made necessary the transfer of boxes of documents to President Trump’s heavily secured home at Mar-a-Lago,” the lawyers stated. “To be clear, had NARA offered President Trump the same assistance that it had provided to all previous Presidents, he would have accepted the offer, and there would have been no reason to transfer the documents to Mar-a-Lago.”
Although Trump offered to let the FBI search for records, they opted to raid his home instead. His lawyers determined that the DOJ was being intentionally combative while ignoring President Trump’s family’s constitutional rights,
“From the inception of this matter, rather than working cooperatively to ensure the return of all marked documents and correct any procedural failures, the DOJ team chose a path of aggressive combativeness. In doing so, it compromised the evidence, constitutional rights, and, in many instances, the professional ethics of its prosecutors.”
The letter questioned whether or not the DOJ made the judge aware that Trump had willingly offered to let the department search his home,
The DOJ “utterly failed to make an accurate presentation to the Magistrate Judge, thereby violating President Trump’s constitutional rights against an unreasonable search and seizure; the “DOJ likely concealed from the Judge that President Trump had offered his cooperation or that the DOJ team could have pursued a consensual search, as President Trump had essentially invited them to do.”
