I appeared on Newsmax today, along with Alan Dershowitz, to discuss the indictment of Donald Trump with regard to records he took with him when he left office and then stored mostly at Mar-a-Lago, with some boxes apparently finding their way to Trump’s estate in Bedminster, NY. The result of investigation by Jack Smith, DOJ Special Counsel, was an Indictment of Trump on a variety of charges related to willful and allegely unlawful possession and transmittal of National Defense Information, and obstruction of justice charges.
Prof. Dershowitz and I were in agreement that the indictment was the result of targeting of Trump, and that Trump may have given the feds what they were looking for. That’s a point I made after the indictment was known but not yet unsealed, Trump May Have Handed The Feds What They’ve Spent Seven Years Seeking – A Prosecutable Charge.
Here are my comments during the interview with Tom Basile of Newsmax:
(Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)
Basile (02:05):
Professor Jacobson, looking at this indictment, there was one particular account that stood out to me and it describes conversation, I believe Professor Dershowitz just mentioned one of them, between Trump and his legal team, in which Trump said the following, in reference to a member of Hillary Clinton’s staff. He said he was great. He did a great job. He was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with scheduling and going to the gym and beauty appointments. So he didn’t get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted them. Now, if you’re Jack Smith, I assume that this is one of those ways that you suggest to a jury that the former president was directing his attorneys or his personal aid to destroy evidence. Do you think that this case should have been brought to begin with? And why haven’t we seen similar action to, to Professor Dershowitz’s point against President Biden?
WAJ (03:01):
I think a couple of things can be true. As Professor Dershowitz pointed out that he, Donald Trump, has been targeted for several years by multiple levels of prosecutors for political reasons, and that’s really damaging to our society. On the other hand, there may be enough here to justify an indictment, particularly based on the possession and transmission, arguably, of national defense information.
But when it comes to the obstruction of justice charges, there’s a lot that’s not in the indictment that we would need to know. So for example, what was the response of the lawyers to that comment by Donald Trump? What was his tone of voice when he said it? These are things we don’t know. Did the conversation go any further? And there are a number of statements, snippets really, of statements attributed to Donald Trump that we don’t know the context of them. Do they rise to the level of an instruction to the attorneys to obstruct the invest investigation? There’s really not enough in the indictment to prove that, that’s something that would have to be proven at trial. But this comes across as a very political, argumentative sort of document.
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Basile (06:25):
So this goes to your point that there are things that are taken out of, professor Jacobson’s point that this, there were things that were taken out of context. 15 seconds. Professor Jacobson, on the [Biden] bribery case. Where do you think this goes next?
WAJ (06:39):
Well, I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere because I don’t think there’s any political interest on the part of the Department of Justice to prosecute the Biden family.
One thing about the Trump indictment, the one thing that’s missing that jumped out at me, is there’s no claim that this information which was stored in a very sloppy manner actually fell into enemy hands, actually caused damage to our national security. And what it is, that there was the possibility of that. And when you’re going to prosecute a major political candidate in campaign season. I think prosecutorial discretion, there has to be, that requires more….
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