‘It’s a BIG Problem’: Ex-Trump White House Lawyer Says New Charges, Trump’s Bluster Are Chipping Away at His Defense

Jim Schultz, who previously served as Associate White House Counsel under former president Donald Trump, suggested Friday that the new charges against Trump in the classified documents case brought against him could present a “big problem” for his defense team.

On CNN, Schultz was asked to speculate on the “mood” of Trump’s lawyers and said that “the most significant piece coming out of this” was the fact that the Department of Justice now has the document with classified information about U.S. plans for a hypothetical war with Iran in its possession.

Trump is heard boasting that the document showed he didn’t want to go to war with Iran on a tape recording from July 2021 already in the DOJ’s hands. He has defended himself by insisting that he didn’t really have a classified document, and that he was only “talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents.”

“I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth,” he explained.

Schultz said that now that prosecutors have the documents, “they probably have folks who they’ve been able to question with that document and say ‘is this the document that he was speaking of relating to Iran in that discussion that was laid out in the first indictment?'”

“That’s a real problem for Donald Trump’s defense team at this time,” he added. “Without that document he had the defense that it was just papers or newspaper clippings and things like that. “Now that they have that document, and if witnesses can corroborate it, it’s a big problem.”

Later in the conversation, Schultz said that this public debunking of Trump’s claims could hurt him in court and with the public.

“It’s just another chip in each one of the defenses that he’s out there positing in a public way, and it knock him down every time and it creates problems for them both from a public perspective, but also when they have to go in to defend the case in court,” he argued.

Watch above via CNN.

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