Trump Lawyer REFUSED Order to Say All Classified Docs Were Returned – Was Spooked By Jan. 6 Probe, Per Maggie Haberman
L: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images R: Department of Justice
Trump attorney Alex Cannon refused an order to tell federal authorities that all classified material had been returned, according to two sources for New York Times correspondent and Trump biographer Maggie Haberman.
As Haberman’s controversial but much-buzzed-about book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America hits shelves, the scribe continues to break scoops from Trumpworld, including the revelation that Cannon wisely decided not to deliver a message that would have turned out to be false:
Shortly after turning over 15 boxes of government material to the National Archives in January, former President Donald J. Trump directed a lawyer working for him to tell the archives that he had returned all the documents he had taken from the White House at the end of his presidency, according to two people familiar with the discussion.
The lawyer, Alex Cannon, had become a point of contact for officials with the National Archives, who had tried for months to get Mr. Trump to return presidential records that he failed to turn over upon leaving office. Mr. Cannon declined to convey Mr. Trump’s message to the archives because he was not sure if it was true, the people said.
Haberman’s reporting confirms an earlier report by The Washington Post and, as Haberman pointed out on Twitter, includes a key detail about the timing of those conversations.
“At the time, the various investigations related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters were ramping up, with a number of requests for documents, the people familiar with the discussion said. Mr. Cannon told people that he was concerned that if Mr. Trump was found to be withholding material related to Jan. 6, he would be in a worse situation, according to people familiar with the discussions,” Haberman wrote.
We now know that the declaration Cannon refused to make would have been false, as Trump is now under investigation for crimes involving the Espionage Act after thousands of documents — some bearing classified markings — were seized from former President Donald Trump‘s Mar-a-Lago resort home.
