Analysis: Donald Trump’s legal gambits offer fresh revelations and deepen his

CNN
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Donald Trump’s scattershot defense in the weeks since FBI agents descended on his Mar-a-Lago resort has only exposed the depth of the mess he faces over his refusal to return classified documents that led to an unprecedented search of an ex-president’s home.

As he keeps inadvertently giving the Justice Department new openings, there are also signs that the fast-expanding drain on Trump’s time and focus is having a political impact as he considers delaying his timeline for the launch of a likely 2024 White House bid, as CNN’s Gabby Orr and Kristen Holmes reported Wednesday.

But Trump is not done with the time-honored strategy of delaying, distorting and trying to tie the legal system up in knots, which has throughout his life in business and politics often succeeded in postponing or preventing accountability.

In a legal filing on Wednesday laced with trademark chutzpah ahead of a critical new court hearing in Florida, Trump ditched a core argument he’s made for days – that he had already declassified documents found on his property.

In a head-spinning pivot, Trump’s legal team effectively argued that no one should be shocked he had classified documents at his home – he was once president, after all.

“Simply put, the notion that Presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been cause for alarm,” the filing said.

The bald-faced statement was a classic Trumpian tactic. It recalled the ex-President’s insistence that an official account of a conversation in which he self-evidently coerced the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden with the promise of military aid was, on the contrary, evidence of “a perfect call.”

Trump’s approach immediately gives his supporters in the GOP and on conservative media new material to muddy the waters, distort the case against him and accuse the DOJ and the FBI of political motives.

But he did not address the core questions swirling around him in the documents case. These include: why did a former president need material, some bearing the highest designations of classification in the intelligence community? And why did he keep material that could potentially damage national security and endanger US agents overseas in insecure locations in his heavily visited resort?

And he also ignored a fundamental principle underlying the Justice Department investigation: According to US law, the papers of former presidents do not belong to the individual who once sat in the Oval Office. They belong to the nation and should be in the custody of the National Archives – an agency that made exhaustive efforts to retrieve Trump’s haul before turning to the Justice Department.

Often Trump’s political and legal strategies cross-pollinate. This was highly successful in the case of the Ukraine call, which led to his first impeachment, although he avoided conviction in the Senate, which could have removed him from office. The complication here, however, is that Trump is facing not political scrutiny but the judgment of the law. And recent days suggest that he’s deeply exposed – not least because of a scathing Justice Department filing on Tuesday that obliterated many of his previous defenses and raised the possibility that Trump and his lawyers could face obstruction charges.

Still Trump’s Wednesday filing, in support of his call for the appointment of an independent official known as a special master to work out whether the FBI took legally privileged documents from his home, could still work for him in the short term. If a judge agrees with his expansive definition of the role, Trump could throw a stick in the spokes of the investigation. He might be able to launch court challenges rooted in legal and executive privilege claims that could be frivolous but would take time to work through the system. And he could challenge the Presidential Records Act through various and exhaustive levels of the legal system. A hearing on Trump’s request is set for 1 p.m. ET Thursday.

If he can push the investigation deep into 2023 and possibly beyond, it could conflict with the presidential campaign and help Trump portray the episode as a politicized effort by the Biden administration to thwart his return to the White House. And he could once more frustrate political opponents desperate to see him quickly pay a price for his refusal to observe presidential norms and constant challenges to the rule of law.

This is one reason why the DOJ urged the judge to equip any special master she appoints with exceedingly limited guidelines for operation.

In itself, a special master is not an unreasonable request in such a case, according to legal experts, though the…