National security attorney Bradley Moss on Wednesday took a hatchet to one of former President Donald Trump’s favorite defenses in the Mar-a-Lago documents scandal that got him indicted on dozens of felony counts.
During an appearance on CNN, Moss was asked about Trump’s repeated invocation of the so-called “Clinton socks case” that involved right-wing organization Judicial Watch suing to get personal tapes that Clinton possessed that the group claimed contained classified information.
In that case, the courts ruled that Clinton had a right to keep those personal tapes — but Moss said that the details of the case show it is completely different from the current case with Trump.
“It has no comparison to the present situation,” he said. “So what happened in the… ‘sock case,’ they made these audio tapes and fell within the definition of personal records under the Presidential Records Act. They were never ever designated as anything other than personal records.”
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Moss noted that the judge in the ruling said that Clinton could keep his recordings because the National Archives had chosen to let him take them from the White House and had not issued a demand for their return.
Intelligence on nuclear weapons programs, on the other hand, would never have been designated as personal records that could be removed from the White House, and Moss said that it is certainly something that the government would subpoena to get back.
“When he left the White House, under the Presidential Records Act, he was supposed to let the archivist take control of that,” Moss said. “He was not supposed to walk off with them and he couldn’t keep them in Mar-a-Lago in any of the various unsecured locations that were listed in the indictment. His team will try to raise this case in pretrial motions. It will fail.”
Watch the video below or at this link.