Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani offered a new explanation for why the former president had classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort. According to Giuliani, Trump was just trying to keep them safe.
“They want to make him responsible for having taken classified documents and preserve [sic] them,” Giuliani said during an appearance on Newsmax. “Really, if you look at the Espionage Act, it’s not really about taking the documents, it’s about destroying them or hiding them or giving them to the enemy. It’s not about taking them and putting them in a place that’s roughly as safe as they were in in the first place.”
Trump was accused of violating 18 US Code 793 – part of the Espionage Act. It is concerned with “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,” which relates to any document relating to national defense that “through gross negligence” was “illegally removed from its proper place of custody … to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed.”
Trump was also accused of obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.
The FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 and seized 11 sets of classified documents. The list includes documents that were to be kept in a secure government facility and could only be accessed by a small group of people with specific security clearances.
Giuliani is the latest Trump ally to add to the endless stream of bad excuses to explain why Donald Trump had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Since the raid, Trump and his allies have accused the FBI of planting evidence. They’ve also claimed there were no classified documents since they would’ve handed them over when asked. Once court documents were released showing that classified documents were seized in the search, Trump and his allies claimed he had a “standing order” to declassify. Trump’s latest excuse was that the documents were covered by executive privilege.
