Advertising

Former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissman explained in great detail why Monday was a momentous news day for the allegedly purloined classified documents retrieved from former President Donald Trump from his Mar-a-Lago home two weeks ago.

In a Tuesday morning appearance on Morning Joe, the former FBI exec turned MSNBC analyst noted that one particular sentence in a New York Times report was “incredibly damning” for the former president and added that — if the reporting is accurate — the Department of Justice is looking at a “substantial criminal case” against Trump.

The context of the conversation includes several new and related stories that broke on Monday. Pro-Trump media figure John Solomon published a memo from the National Archives to Trump in which he breathlessly implicated the Biden White House being involved politically. The memo reveals standard operating procedure and is far from exculpatory of the former president.

Later on Monday evening, The New York Times reported that roughly 300 classified documents had been retrieved from the Mar-a-Lago “raid” that was or wasn’t a raid, depending on one’s definition. There was also former President Trump’s legal team filing for a “special master” to review documents taken so he could have personal information returned.

Weissman said of Monday’s headlines, “there was a lot of news; none of it was good for the president.” He then revealed that The New York

Times reporting “I found most interesting because of one particular sentence, which is that several sources said that when the archives were trying to get documents back, it was the former president, Donald Trump, who personally reviewed the boxes in deciding what to return. That means he also decided what not to return:

The specific mention he appears to be referencing:

The specific nature of the sensitive material that Mr. Trump took from the White House remains unclear. But the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.

“We know from the archive, not just from The New York Times, that in those 15 boxes were a substantial number of classified documents at the highest level,” Weissman continued. “That is TSSCI (Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information), which is, you know, compartmented program, special access programs. They constituted just within the 15 boxes, 700 pages of classified documents.”

“So that is incredibly damning,” he continued. “If you are a prosecutor, you really look for evidence of what the former president did personally. If the DOJ either knows about or

is soon to interview those people who were sources for The New York Times, they’re going to have a substantial criminal case.”

As General Counsel for the FBI during the Trump administration, Weissman played a vital role in the Mueller probe into Russian election interference, which has led to a great deal of hostility from conservative media outlets.

Watch above via MSNBC.

Tags: Andrew Weissman, Donald Trump, Mar-a-Lago Raid