Jeanine Pirro Inches Closer to Reporting the Truth About Trump’s Charges
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro did slightly better on Thursday’s episode of The Five than she did two days prior when it came to accurately describing former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case in a Florida federal court.
In that case, Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon earlier in the day declined to toss the felony charges after Trump’s lawyers argued that laws about classified documents were “unconstitutionally vague.” Yet Cannon allowed that argument to be made at trial—whenever that takes place.
Special Counsel Jack Smith last year brought 40 charges against Trump, most of which are Espionage Act violations for willfully retaining national defense information. Trump is also charged with conspiring to obstruct justice, as are his two co-defendants, longtime valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira.
Yet as Pirro told it, it was as if that charge hadn't been brought last summer.
“You’ve got Jack Smith who wants to charge Donald Trump with obstruction,” Pirro yelled. “You can only be charged with obstruction if there was an underlying crime. Possession of a presidential record is not a crime. It belongs to the president. The president, at any time, can access those records. So, obstruction only applies if there is a crime. There is no crime. This is all lawfare.”
On Tuesday, Pirro had claimed that Trump “is not charged with obstructing.”
And as for her insistence that Trump was acting within the law, Smith’s prosecutors last week rejected the notion that Trump had authority to possess classified documents following his tenure in the White House.
“These assertions stem from Trump’s pervasive claim that his former service as president somehow exempts him from the laws and principles of accountability that govern every other citizen,” they wrote. “As a former president, Trump could not have failed to understand the paramount importance of protecting the nation’s national-security and military secrets, including the obligations not to take unauthorized possession of, or willfully retain, national defense information.”
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