CNN Legal Analyst Mocks Kash Patel’s Defense of Trump on Fox News: ‘If I Were Him, I Would Stay Quiet’
Jennifer Rodgers dismissed the increasingly bizarre ways in which Donald Trump’s allies have tried defending the former president after the FBI’s search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst, joined Inside Politics on Monday — where Abby Phillip asked for her reaction to Congressman Mike Turner’s (R-IN) theorizing that Trump might have needed the classified materials the FBI found in order to write a memoir. Rodgers called the argument “ridiculous,” unpersuasive, and “unhelpful ultimately to the former president.”
Phillip raised the question of whether Trump is getting decent legal advice from those close to him. She made her point by referring to Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official who recently made the dubious stance about his old boss having the authority to declassify documents with no broader security process.
Phillip rolled footage of Patel speaking to Fox News’ Mark Levin and pushing the disputed notion that Trump had a “sweeping declassification order” for the documents he took. Patel, who is on Trump’s legal team, also used the interview to say “[The Government Services Administration] were the ones that moved the documents to Mar-a-Lago. They were the ones that have now admitted they mistakenly moved boxes. It’s not like President Trump, even if they get past the declassification farce…it’s not like President Trump put them in a backpack.”
Jennifer Rodgers dismissed that defense, likening the “silliness” to the argument that “if you steal a house full of stuff and hire movers to move it to a different house, they’re guilty.”
“If I could offer a free piece of legal advice to Mr. Patel, he is implicated in this as a negotiator for the former president with the National Archives,” she said. “So to the extent that the government ultimately finds that the National Archives were lied to, and that all of this was part of a potential crime, Mr. Patel might be implicated. If I were him, I would stay quiet.”
Watch above, via CNN.
