Maggie Haberman Offers Defense of Trump in Espionage Act Investigation – Maybe He’s Just Guilty of ‘Loving Tchotchkes’
New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman offered a “less nefarious” reason for former President Donald Trump‘s possession of documents in potential violation of the Espionage Act — he loves “tchotchkes.”
Haberman, who has been dropping new scoops on Trump on a regular basis, has a deep dive on the materials that were seized during a search of Trump’s Mar-a-lago resort home, which we’ve learned is part of an investigation of Trump for crimes involving the Espionage Act. Specifically, Haberman analyzes the various reasons Trump might have kept the documents in question.
On Thursday’s edition of NYT‘s The Daily podcast with host Michael Barbaro, Haberman elaborated, telling Barbaro that while the Justice Department has “broader” concerns about what Trump was doing with the documents, There might be a “less nefarious” motive at work — Trump’s “long history of loving tchotchkes and showing them off to people”:
MICHAEL BARBARO: Maggie, is the Department of Justice claiming that Trump did anything wrong with these documents during all this time? Or is this just about a theoretical fear that he might at some point do something wrong with documents, share them with somebody who was a spy for an agent? So on.
MAGGIE HABERMAN: What we know the federal government has alleged, Michael, is that they wanted documents back and couldn’t get them and it may end there. We don’t know. We don’t know if there is something broader. But there have been some clues from the Justice Department that there is something broader.
MICHAEL BARBARO: Such as?
MAGGIE HABERMAN: Well, they’ve done a number of interviews with current Trump aides who would have some visibility into whether documents were still at the property and what he was doing with them. But also former senior Trump White House officials who had direct knowledge of how documents were handled. And they’ve clearly tried gleaning insight into what was going on with Trump and these documents over a long period of time. So the Justice Department was clearly afraid that Trump could do exactly what you just said, share them, let somebody access them through carelessness, put the federal government at risk by doing so, and that it could be with some knowledge of what he was doing. But to be fair, Trump is somebody, as I told you last time we talked about this, who has a long history of loving tchotchkes and showing them off to people. So there is a world where these were things he took as some kind of personal keepsake because he refuses to see them as the government’s property, and that it was less nefarious than it was obstinate. But for the federal government, that doesn’t matter that much.
MICHAEL BARBARO: Right. I do wonder what the federal government would think of you describing a top secret document as tchotchkes.
MAGGIE HABERMAN: But they’re I’m sure there are many, many, many national security officials, current and former, who would take issue with that. But that’s how he would say it.
Watch above via The Daily.
