Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance ridiculed Donald Trump‘s claim that he is protected by the Presidential Records Act (PRA) in the Mar-a-Lago documents case against him — thought by many to be the Special Prosecutor’s most straightforward case. Vance called Trump’s PRA defense “specious garbage.”
Considering the case, where Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon will consider Trump’s motion to dismiss on PRA grounds, Vance wrote:
“You’re probably familiar with Trump’s claims that the Presidential Records Act prevents his prosecution for possession/retention of classified documents after he left the White House. He’s advanced this specious garbage on the campaign trail, claiming that his magical designation of the highly classified documents as his own records is a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Vance goes on to dispute what she characterizes as an intentional, fantastic misreading of the PRA by Trump’s attorneys.
Vance specifically refers to campaign trail stump talks like the one seen in the video below, where Trump claims the Presidential Records Act entitles him to keep virtually any document from his time in office.
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s office responded to the motion to dismiss by excoriating Trump’s PRA claim: “Trump’s reliance on the PRA as a basis for dismissing the indictment is wrong. The PRA does not exempt Trump from the criminal law, entitle him to unilaterally declare highly classified presidential records to be personal records, or shield him from criminal investigations—let alone allow him to obstruct a federal investigation with impunity.”
The Special Counsel asserts plainly that “once Trump left office, he no longer had authorization to possess classified information, he never received a waiver entitling him, as a former President, to possess it.”
Smith’s office even cites the Trump-appointed special counsel Robert Hur’s controversial report on President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, which did not charge Biden with a crime.
Hur acknowledged there were significant differences in the documents cases against Trump and Biden, and also punctured the use of the PRA as a defense. The Hur report said it “decline[d] to adopt the argument that compliance with the [PRA] authorizes former presidents and vice presidents to retain national defense information in unsecured and unapproved locations.”
Experts on both sides of the aisle have broadly agreed that Trump’s highest legal hill to climb is the documents case. Last summer, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy (LA) called the classified documents case as “almost a slam dunk” for the prosecution.
There has been little indication that the opinion of Judge Aileen Cannon, who is considering Trump’s motion to dismiss the case, agrees with Cassidy or Smith.
Defying Trump’s allegedly magical transformation of the official documents into personal documents, Vance describes Smith’s argument “that the nature of the documents establishes that they are presidential records and that the court isn’t bound by what Trump says.” It is up to Cannon, Vance asserts, to show that this is true — that “the court isn’t bound by what Trump says.”