Maggie Haberman Source Calls BS on Trump ‘Bring Work Home’ Excuse for This Whole Espionage Act Flap

New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman said a former White House adviser called former President Donald Trump‘s excuse for improperly possessing classified documents — that he was simply bringing work home with him, and auto-declassifying them in the process — into question.

Trump finds himself under investigation for crimes involving the Espionage Act, stemming from materials that were seized during a search of Trump’s Mar-a-lago resort home that was conducted Monday.

Trump and many Republicans responded to that raid by waging a campaign to baselessly smear the FBI, which appears to have been the motivation for an attack on an FBI headquarters in Cincinnati that was carried out by a supporter of Trump — 42-year-old Ricky Shiffer — who was angry about the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

Trump has also expelled a blizzard of excuses and dismissals of the raid, which included a statement that was read aloud, on Friday’s Hannity, by John Solomon,  editor-in-chief of  Just the News:

As we can all relate to, everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time. American presidents are no different. President Trump, in order to prepare the work the next day, often took documents including classified documents to the residence.

He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them. The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the president of the United States.

The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat with classification authority delegated by the president needs to approve the declassification is absurd.

But minutes later, Haberman took to Twitter to say she had a former Trump administration source to refute the statement.

“Just asked a former senior administration official who would be in a position to know about such a thing and they had absolutely no idea what this report is talking about,” Haberman wrote.

Just asked a former senior administration official who would be in a position to know about such a thing and they had absolutely no idea what this report is talking about https://t.co/ucEXaHdblg

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 13, 2022

Haberman is considered a well-sourced journalist when it comes to Trump and his circle.