Lara Trump Insists DOJ ‘Leaked’ Damning Photo of Classified Docs Before Saying They Were Declassified
Lara Trump was given a lot of latitude on Fox & Friends as she melded several different defenses for her father-in-law over the FBI’s search for the classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago.
Mrs. Trump spoke to Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt on Thursday about Donald Trump’s push for an independent review of the documents seized by the FBI, even though the DOJ has warned that a special master review could harm government interests. The ex-president’s daughter-in-law, a Fox News contributor, bashed the DOJ’s argument as she claimed the Mar-a-Lago search “never had to do with a crime. It had to do with presidential records.”
“In a normal situation you would have a civilized back-and-forth about what was personal and what was something that could go into a presidential library, perhaps,” she said. “That, of course did not happen here. I guess that’s granted to people unless your name is Donald Trump.”
Mrs. Trump’s remarks gloss over how the DOJ tried numerous times to ask for the return of the documents Trump allegedly attempted to conceal, that Trump has been careening between excuses for possessing those documents, and that he has no legal claim to them. Trump has repeatedly claimed to have declassified the documents, though there’s no record of him going through the accepted protocols to make that happen, and its highly ambiguous whether they were declassified at all.
Mrs. Trump continued by referring to the photo the FBI included in their filing, showing numerous papers marked “top secret” or “sensitive compartmentalized information” (SCI). Despite the fact that the photo was part of the filing to the DOJ, Mrs. Trump got conspiratorial by saying “you have the photo-op that they shockingly leaked themselves, from the FBI, of all those documents scattered on the floor there in my father-in-law’s office.”
“I got to tell you, it just looks to people in America like the DOJ, the FBI is out to try and clear their name and justify this unprecedented raid, something that should have never happened,” she complained. She went on by calling the search a violation of her father-in-law’s rights, plus she reiterated his complaints about how the documents were treated.
It looks like they knew that maybe they got a little heavy-handed with this approach, let’s take a photo and then let’s conveniently leak it out. I think their goal was, of course, to say ‘Look, all of these are labeled as classified documents.’ Well just because something has that label on it doesn’t mean that’s something that wasn’t declassified by my father-in-law while he was still president, which he says everything he took from the Oval Office was declassified.
The interview concluded with Earhardt asking if Trump declassified “every single one of those documents,” and Mrs. Trump answered “it is my understanding, before he left the Oval Office, anything that was taken was declassified.”
Watch above via Fox News.
