Prominent Lawyer Gets Alarming Traction on Twitter For Accusing Maggie Haberman of a Felony Over Trump Reporting
Tristan Snell is a lawyer and a former New York assistant attorney general who has appeared on MSNBC and CNN to deliver legal analysis. He has 294,600 followers on Twitter, where on Tuesday, he suggested Maggie Haberman is guilty of a felony. The tweet accusing Haberman of a crime has more than 11,500 retweets and 60,000 likes.
I’m not a journalist, so I can’t say whether Maggie Haberman is doing her job appropriately.
I am a lawyer, though, so I can say her failure to report Trump’s felonies upon discovering them — saving them for her book instead — appears to be misprision, which is itself a felony.
— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) September 27, 2022
The tweet comes as Haberman once again draws the wrath of liberal Twitter. This time, it’s for revealing in her upcoming book that, in an interview with Donald Trump last year, the former president said he had taken documents from the White House.
According to Haberman:
He demurred when I asked if he had taken any documents of note upon departing the White House—“nothing of great urgency, no,” he said, before mentioning the letters that Kim Jong-un had sent him, which he had showed off to so many Oval Office visitors that advisers were concerned he was being careless with sensitive material. “You were able to take those with you?” I asked. He kept talking, seeming to have registered my surprise, and said, “No, I think that’s in the archives, but … Most of it is in the archives, but the Kim Jong-un letters … We have incredible things.”
In fact, Trump did not return the letters—which were included in boxes he had brought to Mar-a-Lago—to the National Archives until months later. The Washington Post reported on it in early 2022; the Justice Department began investigating how the classified material made its way in and out of the White House residence.
Based on that information, Snell appears to be arguing Haberman knew that Trump had committed the crime of taking classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. By not reporting that crime to authorities, the theory goes, she is guilty of misprision, a felony.
Snell allowed for a few caveats in subsequent tweets. He noted he is not a First Amendment lawyer, that Haberman is not alone among reporters in saving scoops for books, and that “it’s possible Haberman DID report the crimes to authorities.”
Putting aside the absurdity of calling for the prosecution of journalists based on an ambiguous book excerpt, I wanted to talk to an actual First Amendment lawyer about whether Haberman could be guilty of a felony, as Snell seems to believe and thousands on Twitter seem to agree with.
When reached for comment by Mediaite, Ken White, a former federal prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney, first replied with a link to one particularly apt scene from My Cousin Vinny.
After some badgering, he explained the problem with Snell’s premise:
Federal misprision of a felony is not simply failing to report a felony you learn about. It requires an affirmative act to conceal the fact that a federal felony has been committed. It’s close to the crime of accessory after the fact. So Haberman, by learning of alleged crimes by Trump, did not commit federal misprision unless she took affirmative steps to conceal not just that she knew, but conceal that Trump committed a crime — like destroying evidence or preventing a witness from coming forward.
Most states have abandoned misprision of a felony as a crime, and in the relatively few where it remains, it still requires more than mere failure to report.
Other lawyers agree with White. “Misprision prosecutions require proof of affirmative acts of concealment,” said David French. “Tristan’s tweet is flat wrong.”
Fortunately, despite the bloodlust of an alarming quantity of liberals on Twitter, Maggie Haberman will not be going to prison for her reporting on Trump. The book tour can continue apace!
