NEW HABERMAN SCOOP: Trump Told Aides He Would Trade Documents He Took To Mar-a-Lago For FBI’s Russia Files
L: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images R: Department of Justice
New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman has dropped a new scoop: former President Donald Trump wanted to barter the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago for the FBI’s files on the Trump/Russia investigation.
Haberman has been making the rounds to promote the release of her controversial but much-buzzed-about book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.
But she has also found time to drop scoop after scoop about the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump for crimes involving the Espionage Act after thousands of documents — some bearing classified markings — were seized from his home in August.
On Saturday, Haberman and Michael Schmidt dropped a new one, reporting that Trump effectively wanted to use the Mar-a-Lago documents as hostages — to procure other secret documents:
Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.
In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.
Mr. Trump’s aides never pursued the idea. But the episode is one in a series that demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.
Haberman highlighted some of her report’s findings on Twitter:
NEW: Trump, seeking Russian investigation-related classified documents last fall from archives, proposed a deal to advisers: tell archives he would trade the Mar-a-Lago documents he had for them. @nytmike and me https://t.co/ZRTzQUBqDY
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 8, 2022
The “pattern was strikingly similar to how Mr. Trump confronted inquiries into his conduct while in office: entertain or promote outlandish ideas, eschew the advice of lawyers and mislead them, then push lawyers and aides to impede investigators.” https://t.co/nUmxtvJD09
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) October 8, 2022
“But archives officials made clear that even newspaper clippings and printouts of articles seen by Mr. Trump in office were considered presidential records.” https://t.co/UuFuPuttu5
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 8, 2022
Haberman and Schmidt also provide a deep dive on Trumpworld’s handling of the document issue.
