Trump Lawyer Complains DOJ is Seeking to Charge Ex-President Under ‘Mundane Statutes: Espionage and Two Others’

Former President Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba complained on Wednesday to Charlie Kirk that the Department of Justice is going after her boss over “mundane” legal statutes like “espionage.”

“They say themselves in the papers that they filed that this is under the Presidential Records Act,” begins Habba.

“So what they did was to try and criminalize Donald Trump, as they always do. They found these three mundane statutes, espionage and the two others, obstruction,” she continued.

“And they’re trying to claim that there was some sort of criminal activity. But their papers say it’s under the Presidential Records Act. So your admission is the power that we’ve all been saying he does have. You can take a picture of top secret documents, Charlie, and show the world a label,” she continued referencing the bombshell legal filing from Tuesday night which included a photo of documents labeled “classified” found at Trump’s private home.

“But if they’re declassified, as he has the right to do that, he has the right to have them,” she concluded.
The warrant allowing the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago cited three potential statute violations by Trump:

18 USC 2071 — Concealment, removal or mutilation
18 USC 793 — Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information
18 USC 1519 — Destruction, alteration or falsification of records in Federal investigations

18 USC 793 is the Espionage Act, which Habba referenced.

Ironically, it was Trump himself in January of 2018 who stiffened the penalty for mishandling classified documents.

Trump campaigned in 2016 spreading allegations that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had mishandled classified information and vowed to “restore honor to our government. In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information.”
“No one will be above the law,” he added during a campaign stop in Charlotte, North Carolina on August 18, 2016.

As a result of that pledge, Trump signed S. 139 into law. The bill, which Trump supported, edited 18 U.S. Code §1924 to make the mishandling of classified information a federal felony carrying up to 5 years in prison.

Former CIA Director David Petraeus was punished under the original version of the law in 2015 for sharing sensitive emails with Paula Broadwell and keeping classified material in an unsecured location in his home. Petraeus resigned as CIA director as a result of the scandal and was fined $100,000 and given two years of probation. Petraeus’s punishment would have likely been harsher after Trump increased the penalty in 2018.