“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough on Wednesday suggested that Donald Trump could realistically be charged with obstruction of justice based on the previous day’s unsealing of more details from the affidavit the FBI used to authorize its raid on the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
“Based on the fact pattern out there in the press and all sides have admitted to, one charge, potential charge really does seem more obvious than others even right now, and that is flat-out obstruction of justice,” Scarborough told co-host Willie Geist.
“Again, let’s just keep it to the standard of no man is above the law,” Scarborough said. “Anybody else would have been in jail for doing that. It’s that simple.”
NBC News investigations correspondent Tom Winter detailed how we learned a bit more about the timeline surrounding the Department of Justice’s investigation into the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
Chief among the revelations of the unsealed affidavit is the FBI’s June 22 request for surveillance footage from inside Mar-a-Lago that would have documented the areas around the storage room where the boxes of top secret docs were retrieved. The Trump Organization didn’t give the FBI that requested footage until two weeks later, on July 6.
In a previously released separate filing, the Department of Justice said that it has “developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.” Such surveillance footage from inside Mar-a-Lago could help conclude whether or not anyone tried to obstruct the FBI’s probe.
Considering the gap between the FBI’s request for the footage and Trump’s compliance, Geist asked Winter if an obstruction charge could hold water in this case, considering “even when the FBI went in to get what they needed, they couldn’t get it all because the Trump team wouldn’t hand it over.”
Winter responded that he thinks “that was one of the key revelations from yesterday’s filings.”
Scarborough then jumped in: “Lying, claiming that you have given back all the top-secret documents and all the documents that Trump had stolen from the White House, a government building, and taken down to Mar-a-Lago. They just lied about it and lied to the FBI about it.” And that, he said, puts the former president and his team in serious legal jeopardy.
Watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video above.
