President says he declassified secret and sensitive documents – but that may not matter for him to be prosecuted
Nuclear or not, that is an awful lot of classified stuff, especially in view of the fact that 15 boxes of documents had already been removed in January after discussions between the National Archives and Trump’s representatives, and then again in June under a grand jury subpoena.
“That suggests that the government has reason to believe that President Trump has done more than just hold on to these documents,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said. The second strand of the Trump defence, quite contradictory to the first, is that while he was still in the White House, he declassified all the material in question by presidential fiat.Read more
Although it is called the Espionage Act, it does not necessarily mean that Trump took the documents with the intention of passing them to a foreign power. The statute also covers more minor offences – for example, someone who is lawfully in possession of documents, photos and so on and passes them to anyone not entitled to receive it, or fails to hand it over to officials who ought to have it.
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