MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough took aim at former President Donald Trump Thursday morning in a segment exploring the cloak of dishonesty Trump apparently tried to shield himself in when communicating with federal authorities about the volume of classified documents he kept with him at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
Scarborough argues that Trump and his legal team assured the FBI and Department of Justice that they had submitted all of the sensitive material he took with him from the White House, only for more documents to be recovered during the bureau’s search of his home. Since January, the U.S. government has recovered more than 320 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago, including 100 seized in the recent FBI raid.
“You can’t even put this off to Trump’s arrogance, saying he thought the documents were his,” Scarborough said, in the segment you can watch at the top of this post. “Because you have the lie that he’d returned all the documents and of course that screams obstruction of justice. That, at the end of the day, is his biggest legal challenge.”
Trump is under investigation for possible violations of the Espionage Act for the potential mishandling of sensitive materials connected to national security. The MSNBC host’s sticking point through all of this is the former president’s apparent lack of honesty when communicating with federal organizations.
“The FBI and DOJ said, after they got some documents back after begging him to return the documents for months, ‘is this it? Are those all the documents you have?’” Scarborough said. “And Trump and his lawyers aid, ‘Yeah, that’s all we have.’ Then they have people inside the joint at Mar-a-Lago telling the FBI that they are being lied to by Donald Trump.”
During the raid, the FBI seized the contents of a desk drawer that contained classified documents, government records and personal documents of Trump’s that included his passport. This is relevant to the government’s argument that Trump mishandled classified materials.
“In most searches you look for identity documents to tie a suspect to the evidence you’re looking for — photographs, IDs, utility bills. If you find the contraband in the same room as the identity documents, there’s a fair inference that person had dominion and control over the documents,” legal analyst Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told NBC News.
