Trump attorney Alina Habba on Wednesday tried to casually dismiss the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents, claiming that potential acts of “espionage” and “obstruction” are merely “mundane statutes.”
The DOJ responded to Trump’s request for an independent request for a review of the documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago with a scathing filing late Tuesday night. Besides arguing that the ex-president shouldn’t get the records back, the department further revealed that they only executed a search warrant of his premises after obtaining evidence he “likely concealed and removed” documents to block their probe.
Additionally, the DOJ disclosed that the Aug. 8 search found that Trump had three classified documents inside his personal desk, along with over 100 documents marked classified in 13 other boxes—some at the highest “TOP SECRET” level. The filing also suggested that Trump’s lawyers could be in legal peril for previously claiming in June that all sensitive records had been handed over.
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Appearing on pro-Trump pundit Charlie Kirk’s talk show on Wednesday, Habba brushed off the seriousness of the situation, insisting that the Justice Department is fishing and is trying to pin whatever they can on Trump. And things like violating the Espionage Act and obstructing justice are so ho-hum.
“They say themselves in these papers that they filed that this is under the Presidential Records Act,” she declared. “So what they did was try and criminalize Donald Trump as they always do. They found these three mundane statutes: espionage and the two others—obstruction. And they are trying to claim there is some sort of criminal activity.”
Habba then parroted a Team Trump talking point, claiming that it doesn’t matter if the former president was hiding highly classified documents in his personal residence because he can declassify them anytime he wants.
“But their papers say it’s under the Presidential Records Act! So your admission is the power we’ve all been saying he has,” she stated. “So you can take a picture of top secret documents, Charlie, and show the world a label. But if they’re declassified, as he has the right to do, he has the right to have them. And he was working together with [the National Archives and Records Administration], as we know, and that back-and-forth could have been done at a table as they had been doing for months prior.”
While Trump’s inner circle has repeatedly contended that Trump had a “standing order” that “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them,” there has been no paperwork provided to support that claim.
Furthermore, Trump’s attorneys never mentioned that any documents in the original cache of materials returned to the National Archives were classified, and Trump lost the ability to declassify documents once he left office.
Meanwhile, Habba may have another reason to downplay the investigation into Trump. Politico reported on Wednesday that she told a New York State court in May that she conducted a “diligent” search of Mar-a-Lago on a separate legal matter that included “all desks, drawers, nightstands, dressers, closets, etc.” Trump even filed an affidavit authorizing Habba to scour his residence for “any and all documents.” Six days later, the DOJ issued a subpoena to recover classified documents from Mar-a-Lago—records that Habba's previous activities suggest she likely happened upon.
