David Harbach, a prosecutor with the special counsel, argued in court that the classified information found at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence were “nowhere near personal,” as the former president has claimed.
Pushing back against Trump’s arguments that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) authorized him to keep documents after leaving the White House, Harbach said that the law doesn’t give presidents “carte blanche” to improperly designate records as personal.
It would be “absurd,” Harbach said, if the National Archives couldn’t seek the Justice Department’s help after finding a “boatload” of classified records in boxes returned from Mar-a-Lago, which raised concern more classified material remained at the Florida estate. The FBI later searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and found more.
And, Harbach added, even if the records were considered his personal documents under the PRA, as Trump has argued, the PRA “says zero, zip on classified information.”
Former presidents shouldn’t have a “permanent exemption for all time” to classification rules, Harbach said.
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