Former Federal Prosecutor Says Inventory of Classified Documents Seized From Trump Demonstrates ‘Egregiousness’ of His Conduct and Intent
Former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers said the newly unsealed inventory of documents seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence demonstrates “the egregiousness” of the former president’s conduct.
A detailed inventory of the documents seized was released on Friday, revealing magazines and press clippings were mixed in with classified materials. According to the Justice Department filing, of the classified documents 18 were marked top secret, 54 were marked secret and 31 were marked confidential. Top secret documents can cause grave damage to U.S. national security if released.
More than 11,000 non-classified government documents were also seized in the raid, as well as 48 empty folders with a classified banner.
“Anything kept at Mar-a-Lago would be improper if it’s classified because there’s no classified facility there,” Rodgers, a CNN legal analyst, said Friday. “But the notion of this inventory explains how in a box would be unclassified information with different levels of classification. That’s completely improper.”
“So, there’s lots of protocols around this,” Rodgers said. “And all of it seems to have been broken.”
CNN anchor Jim Sciutto asked Rodgers if the sheer volume of documents taken from Trump reveals anything about the criminal case against the former president.
“It does,” she said. “It tells you something about the egregiousness of the behavior and it tells you something about intent.”
She continued:
I mean, we already knew here that there was a lengthy back and forth between Trump and his team and the government, both the National Archives and, of course, DOJ and FBI. So that there’s no question that he knew he was possessing these materials, the nature of them, that they needed to be turned over and wasn’t doing that. So that tells you most of what you need to know about intent. And it also matters, I think, that you’re not talking about a handful of documents. You’re talking about hundreds, thousands of documents. So it will matter to DOJ ultimately when they consider charging this because it just goes to the egregiousness of the conduct and the intent.”
Watch above, via CNN.
