ormer President Donald Trump, who is currently Joe Biden’s biggest obstacle to reelection, is demanding that the Justice Department issue retract its indictment and issue him an apology, citing the Presidential Records Act.
Trump issued the statement on his Truth Social account, going on to cite a Wall Street Journal article by lawyer Michael Bekesha, who wrote that under the act, a president “chooses what records to return or keep and the National Archives can’t do anything about it.”
“The Presidential Records Act allows the president to decide what records to return and what records to keep at the end of his presidency. And the National Archives and Records Administration can’t do anything about it. I know because I’m the lawyer who lost the ‘Clinton sock drawer’ case,” Bekesha wrote in the Journal.
Special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with 37 counts related to his handling of classified documents. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges in federal court Tuesday in Miami. He was booked and released on his own recognizance. He faces decades behind bars.
Georgetown University law school professor Jonathan Turley laid out a rather daunting scenario for Trump if he’s found guilty on just one or two of the federal charges against him.
In a discussion with former U.S. attorney and South Carolina Republican congressman Trey Gowdy, as well as Fox News analyst Brit Hume, Turley said that the number of charges against Trump is significant.
“The problem is that he’s got to run the table, he’s 76 years old, [and] all the government has to do is stick the landing on one count and he could have a terminal sentence,” Turley said. “You’re talking about crimes that have a 10- or 20-year period, as a maximum. The evidence here is quite strong.”
Turley expressed his belief that once a trial jury has the opportunity to hear Trump’s defense team, certain charges may be dismissed. However, the former president still faces a predicament as he is confronted with more than three dozen counts.
“But some of this evidence is coming from his former counsel,” he said. “And these are very damaging statements that have been made against him. It may be hard to move those. The fact is, both things may be true.
“Yes, the Department of Justice may have been out to get him, but he made it easy. If you look at what is being described in this indictment, [when] confronted with someone that he felt was trying to get him, he couldn’t have made it more easy for them to do so,” Turley said.
