• Donald Trump on Tuesday cited a lawsuit involving a 2012 “sock drawer” tape against former President Bill Clinton as his defense against the indictment.
• “According to the Obama Department of Justice and the federal court in Washington, D.C. at the time, the sole responsibility for designating records as personal or belonging to the President rests with the President, presumably on the part of the Archives, the Department of Justice, and even the courts. It’s not a role, it’s a ruling,” Judicial Watch senior attorney Michael Bekesha, who handled the case, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
• Historian Taylor Branch, who helped record Clinton’s tape, told the DCNF that the recording was more like “a diary that Clinton kept” than a government document.

Donald Trump on Tuesday cited a 2012 lawsuit involving “sock drawer” tape against former President Bill Clinton as his defense to the indictment, but whether that legal reasoning would hold up in court was Clinton’s defense. of litigants disagreed.

of case It’s based on historian Taylor Branch’s 79 late-night interviews with Mrs Clinton between 1993 and 2001. idea He spoke of the day’s political events, discussions of military involvement in Haiti, phone calls with foreign leaders, and multiple phone calls with senators. After Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking tapes based on presidential records, activityA federal court ruled in 2012 that they were personal records that were not the subject of the claim.

in the meantime remarks After appearing in court on Tuesday, President Trump said the ruling in the case means he has “unrestricted authority to make decisions regarding the destruction of documents” and therefore “every right” to receive the documents.

Judicial Watch senior attorney Michael Bekesha, who worked on the “sock drawer” case, said the 2012 ruling meant that President Trump had the discretion to designate records as personal under the Presidential Records Act. agree that it means

“According to the Obama Department of Justice and the federal court in Washington, D.C. at the time, the sole responsibility for designating records as personal or belonging to the President rests with the President, presumably on the part of the Archives, the Department of Justice, and even the courts. It’s not a role, it’s a decision,” Bekesha told DCNF.

“Because the president is fully charged with managing and even destroying presidential records during his tenure, we believe Congress intends to reduce the power of the president to do as he pleases. “It is his personal record,” Justice Amy Berman-Jackson said in her ruling.

But Branch told the DCNF that the tapes were more like “Clinton’s journals” than government documents. He said the documents “have never been processed by the government” and are not considered “classified documents” despite their content.

“Look, I don’t want you to think that’s all there is to it.” [innocent stuff,]”He said, ‘He talked about ordering a cruise missile strike to kill Osama bin Laden. If there were government documents about it, it might have been classified at the time. But classified.’ There were no documents, and all I had on those tapes was what he said.”

Branch said Clinton’s intention was to create an oral history documenting what she “couldn’t say publicly” but “wanted to keep” after her death. He dismissed the notion that Clinton’s lawsuit applies to Trump’s indictment.

“They’re trying to bring up arguments that are already lost,” Branch told DCNF. “I think it’s pathetic that they’re trying to say they have a winning argument when they’ve already been laughed out of court.” (Related: ‘Terrible’ and ‘Political’: Legal Experts Opinion on Unsealed Trump Indictment)

(1) Interrelationship between the Espionage Act and the Presidential Records Act

Many of my friends have told me insightful stories about the scope of the Presidential Records Act. I’ll direct you to Mike Davis (@mrddmia) There is also a commentary on this subject, and Michael Bekesha of…

— Will Scharf (@willscharf) June 15, 2023

Trump has been charged with 31 charges of violating the Espionage Act, namely “willful retention of national defense information,” one count of “conspiracy to obstruct justice,” one count of “withholding of documents or records,” and one count of “withholding of documents or records.” 1 count, according to the Act, 1 count of “wrongful concealment of documents or records”, 1 count of “concealment of documents in a federal investigation”, 1 count of “planning to conceal”, ” 1 count of “false statements and representations”. prosecution.

If the documents were not protected by the Presidential Records Act, the government’s raid on Mar-a-Lago to search for records “never should have happened” and charges under the Espionage Act should also be filed. No, Bekesha said. I got it In an op-ed in this week’s Wall Street Journal, he said:

Ed Wielen, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy and Chairman of the Antonin Scalia Committee on Constitutional Studies, countered this argument: twitterargued that the scope of the Presidential Records Act does not include “records of government agencies.”

“Classified materials allegedly held by President Trump do not fall within the narrow definition of personal records under the Act,” Wielen told the DCNF. “The 2012 ruling has nothing to do with a sitting president’s general authority over classified material.”

In response to criticism, Bekesha told the DCNF that the discussion was “very meaningless.”

“The claim that agency records received by the president are still agency property makes little sense,” he said. “These are not library books that must be returned to authorities after his three weeks. Records maintained at an agency are agency records, and copies received by the president are subject to the president’s wishes in accordance with his PRA. You can specify accordingly.”

Missouri Attorney General Candidate Will Scharf and Article III Project Founder Mike Davis It echoes a similar notion that prosecution under the Espionage Act does not stand if the document is a personal record.

“If [Trump] I thought these boxes were his personal records, but he may have believed so. [National Archives and Records Administration] We simply had no right to receive them,” Schaaf said. I have written on Twitter. “That is, he deliberately withheld nothing from officials he knew to be entitled to them, because he did not believe anyone was entitled to them. because it didn’t.”

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