‘He Will Lose This Argument In Court’: Former DOJ Official Dissects Trump’s Documents Defense

Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal panned Donald Trump’s claim that he had the right to retain government documents after he left the White House.

Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury last month on 37 counts. The Department of Justice alleges he willfully retained classified documents and obstructed the government’s efforts to recover them. He pleaded not guilty to all counts.

On Thursday’s edition of The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell played a clip of a rally held by Trump, who is running for president again.

“I had every right to have these documents, personal belongings, and boxes,” Trump told a crowd in South Carolina on Saturday. “I had the absolute right to have ’em.”

Former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann said Trump is incorrect.

“As a matter of law, he is wrong,” he said. “And it’s not even something he going to be able to say, ‘Well ok, maybe I’m wrong legally, but I believed I had that right’ because there will be numerous lawyers, or former White House counsel, and his own personal lawyers telling him these were not his. And he had a grand jury subpoena that required him to return them. So he is going to lose on every front on both the retaining classified documents and on the obstruction front.”

Katyal chimed in to say even though Trump publicly claimed he has a right to the material in question, the former president likely doesn’t believe his own argument.

“I don’t think even Trump believes that this is a legal defense, Lawrence,” Katyal said. “I think this is a political defense. He’s throwing up a lot of spaghetti at the wall and hoping that that will delay the trial and cause enough doubt so that if, in 2024, he or some other Republican wins, they can just drop the prosecution. And I think that’s all that’s going on. This is a political game. These are not legal arguments.”

He went on to note the nature of the documents the DOJ says were in Trump’s possession.

“I mean, I suppose if Donald Trump got a love letter – and of course, this is a counterfactual hypothetical – but if he actually got a love letter from someone, that would be something that he could take home,” Katyal added. “But these kinds of things – nuclear secrets, military secrets, and the like – are absolutely the property of the United States. He will lose this argument in court every day of every week, which is why nobody, no real lawyer believes this.”

Watch above via MSNBC.