‘I’m Not Making A Speech Sir!’ CNN’s Sara Sidner Gets Into It With Trump Lawyer Over New Hard Evidence Of Crime In Docs Probe

CNN anchor Sara Sidner got into a heated exchange with Trump attorney Jim Trusty over what’s Being billed as new “hard evidence” of crime in the classified documents probe.

Multiple sources told CNN that the national archives have notified Trump’s team that they will be providing special counsel Jack Smith with 16 documents that show “hard evidence” that the president knew the correct declassification procedures despite his protests.

On Wednesday night’s edition of CNN Primetime, Sidner broke the news, then interviewed Trusty. As she pressed him about the new evidence, things got testy:

SIDNER: As president of the United States, did Donald Trump know how the declassification process worked, or did he just ignore it?

JIM TRUSTY, ATTORNEY FOR DONALD TRUMP: Well, President Trump was exactly right in your town hall the other day.

He is aware of a bureaucratic process that can be used. He used that bureaucratic process in the middle of his presidency to declassify the Crossfire Hurricane matters that are the subject of that 316-page report we saw this week.

But, at the end of his presidency, he relied on the constitutional authority as commander in chief, which is to take documents and take them to Mar-a-Lago while still president, as he was at the time, and to effectively declassify and personalize them.

He talked about declassifying them, but he didn’t need to. And if you look at the Constitution, you look at the Presidential Records Act, there is absolutely no basis for saying that bureaucracy rules and that a president doesn’t have the authority entrusted in him by the voters to possess and to declassify and to hold onto documents.

SIDNER: Hold on.

Let’s look at the Presidential Records Act and what it actually says. It says: “The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession and control of presidential records.” And, under federal law willfully removing any record or document carries the possibility of a three-year prison sentence.

We went, we looked it up, as journalists do, and you — nowhere does it say that you can mentally just think about it and that they are declassified. So, you haven’t heard this from any other president at any other time.

So, what gives Donald Trump the right to use mental gymnastics to try and figure this out and try to put out there that this was all perfectly legal?

TRUSTY: You have packed so many misstatements into one question, or whatever that was. I’m not sure. But let me tell you this.

SIDNER: Well, I read the law, so it’s not a misstatement.

TRUSTY: The Presidential Records Act — well — yes, well, we will see about that.

The Presidential Record Act does not have a criminal enforcement component to itself, OK? Look at it again, not in the PRA. PRA says that presidents and archivists have to try to work together to resolve the universe of documents that are held onto by the former president or turned over to the archivist.

The universe there is literally personal or presidential. And the case law has shown in every case but President Trump’s that NARA and the DOJ completely defer to the former president’s decisions as to which documents he’s going to hold on to or which ones he’s not. Bill Clinton had audiotapes of hours and hours and hours of recordings from the Oval Office.

When NARA was sued — and, by the way, that’s the remedy under the Presidential Records Act — is civil litigation. When NARA was sued, DOJ stood there in open court and said: Judge, none of us may like it, but the president gets to make that determination. If NARA doesn’t like his determination, they can sue.

Sock drawer, Bill Clinton, his tapes were fine. Obama, 2018, there’s a letter from the Obama Foundation acknowledging millions of documents in a former furniture store in Illinois, including classified documents. And their remedy to any situation there in that totally unsecure setting is to say, you know what, we’re going to give you $3.3 million, NARA, to help transport these documents whenever we digitize the library.

Now, it’s been five years. There’s no hint of a digital library yet. But none of this is criminal. None of it has historically ever been subject to criminal tools such as subpoenas or search warrants. But, for Donald Trump, there’s an exception that this DOJ and this FBI are pursuing to mislead the American public, to misuse statutes that are not criminal and to have an ends-justify-the-means mentality when it comes to one president only.

SIDNER: The statute I read talked about the fact that there could be a three-year prison term.

And I do want to remind you that you talked about the different presidents going and saying: Hey, we have this. We will send it to you.

The issue here, the Archives has — Archive has said, is that they asked for the documents repeatedly over and over and over again over many months and at first were told that they didn’t have them, and then they just wouldn’t turn them over.

And that is the difference between those people who had some of the documents and Donald Trump. So, do you see nothing wrong with what Donald Trump did?

TRUSTY: Absolutely nothing criminally wrong. If they wanted to sue and they wanted to speed up the fight, they could do that. But he engaged in negotiations.

You’re glossing over the fact that, in January of 2022, he gave 15 boxes worth of material to Archives. I have looked at every one of those boxes. He provided that to…

(CROSSTALK)

SIDNER: Right, but after they asked for it over and over and over again.

TRUSTY: Well, let me finish, please.

Let me — it took Nixon 13 years to get his tapes to Archives. OK? Bill Clinton got to hold on to the sock drawer tapes. Obama, NARA, the politicized bureaucrats that they are, announced that, don’t worry, we have everything from Obama. And then Delaware laid bare the truth that they didn’t have everything from the Obama administration. And, frankly, I’m sure they still don’t.

So, every president and many people that don’t even have the power of declassification have held onto documents for years and years and years, hopefully, usually innocuously or even unknowingly, and that is not a criminal prosecution, until we get to today. And that’s the consistency with the…

SIDNER: They can hold onto — but they can have some of the documents that are not — we are talking about classified documents, classified documents that could have huge impacts.

TRUSTY: Right. And the Presidential Records Act, you can…

SIDNER: So let me — let me just — wait. Let me just quickly ask you.

TRUSTY: You can say that.

(LAUGHTER)

SIDNER: Let me quickly ask you. In the letter that you…

TRUSTY: OK. Well, if you want to just — if you want to make speeches, make speeches.

SIDNER: I’m not making a speech, sir. I let you speak for quite some time.

And in the letter that you and your fellow attorneys sent to Congress, you made it a point to not opine, as you put it, about whether the documents were classified.

Why not if, as you say, that your client was doing a — quote — “standing order” that documents removed from the Oval Office were automatically declassified.

TRUSTY: That document was designed to make a very specific point. What we said is, DOJ refuses to show us the affidavit. DOJ refuses to show us the documents, despite me having clearance to review them.

We have no way of knowing whether any of these documents, even by their own terms, would be considered classified, much less declassified by the president. The point was to say to Congress in a nonpartisan way, this is an overreach. We need to look at the system, why all these different presidents and sometimes vice presidents and congresspeople are having classified documents in their possession.

It doesn’t translate into a crime, no matter what the underlying facts are. And so the point of that letter was not to give a full-throated defense of everything we could say at trial, which is numerous types of defenses and numerous moments of overreaching by DOJ, but to point out that a congressional fix, an ODNI-based fix, is the way to go here.

Watch above via CNN Primetime.