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Securing a conviction of former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is "not going to be difficult" following new revelations about Mark Meadows, according to legal analyst Glenn Kirschner.
ABC News reported on Sunday that Meadows, Trump's former White House chief of staff, had told Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith's investigators that he had never been aware of any "standing order" from the former president to broadly declassify documents taken from the Oval Office. The claim has been one of Trump's key defenses against allegations that he mishandled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after the end of his presidency, some of which were later determined to contain sensitive defense information.
In June, a federal grand jury voted to indict Trump on 37 criminal charges stemming from the DOJ and Smith's investigation into the case. Among them, 31 of the charges were for willfully retaining classified materials in violation of the Espionage Act. Trump pleaded not guilty at his arraignment hearing and has dismissed all investigations against him as politically motivated.
Appearing on MSNBC on Sunday, Kirschner, a veteran federal prosecutor who now serves as a legal analyst for various outlets, said that these new revelations about how Meadows has been cooperating with investigators show that prosecutors will be able to call "exclusively" Republican witnesses against Trump at trial. This, he added, would make it harder to dismiss the case against the former president as a "Democrat-led witch hunt" and make it easier to secure a conviction in the end.
"This highlights the importance of the fact that the trial witnesses of Donald Trump, when prosecutors can finally drag Trump and his defense lawyers into court before a jury, the trial witnesses are going to be exclusively Republicans," Kirschner said. "Mark Meadows will testify, assuming he's in a position to testify, rather than being prosecuted and sitting at the defense council table shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump."
He continued: "I have said all along that it was taking a very long time to indict these cases. But once they're actually on trial, standing before 12 citizen-members of the community, there to decide based only on the evidence not on press releases, tweets, or POTUS. What Donald Trump did or didn't do. It's not gonna be that difficult to hold Donald Trump accountable, and to win convictions."
Newsweek reached out to Trump's office via email for comment.
Speaking with ABC News on Sunday, former Vice President Mike Pence echoed Meadows's reported sentiments, saying that he had not been made aware of any sort of standing order, but did not outright dismiss that it might have still happened.
"In my case, I was never made aware of any broad-based effort to declassify documents," Pence explained. "There is a process that the White House goes through to declassify materials, I'm aware of that occurring on several occasions over the course of our four years, but I don't have any knowledge of any broad-based directive from the president, but that doesn't mean it didn't occur. It's not something I ever heard about."
About the writer
Thomas Kika is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in upstate New York. His focus is reporting on crime and national ... Read more