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Former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Friday that a new set of reported witnesses to be called in former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago documents case could be especially dangerous for him.
Among the four criminal indictments Trump has been hit with in the last year, one involves allegations that the former president unlawfully retained and mishandled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in Florida after leaving the White House in 2021. Indicted by a federal grand jury in June, Trump was initially hit with a total of 37 charges, including 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, as well as one count each of conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.
These represented the first-ever federal criminal charges leveled against a former president in United States history. Later, in July, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and special counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment that added two counts of obstructing justice and one count of willfully retaining a top-secret document, based on new evidence. Trump himself pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him and has accused the investigation of being an attempt at interfering with his 2024 presidential campaign.
On Friday, CNN published a report detailing a host of individuals expected to be called as witnesses by federal prosecutors in the documents trial, which is currently set to begin in Florida on May 20, 2024. This includes Mar-a-Lago staffers and contract workers like "a plumber, a maid, a chauffeur, and a woodworker."
These sorts of lower-level workers, Kirschner said in a YouTube video released Friday, could be particularly damaging in court for Trump, based on the former prosecutor's presumption of Trump's poor treatment of such employees.
"I maintain that some of the most potentially dangerous witnesses against Donald Trump are the 'low-level' workers, the people that Donald Trump didn't even know or acknowledge existed," Kirschner, a staunch Trump critic, said.
He later added: "I think one thing is clear, given the scope and the breadth of the witnesses who will be testifying as prosecution witnesses, who will testify about and, in a very real sense, against Donald Trump in the Florida case: Donald Trump is effed."
In reaction to CNN's report, Trump took to Truth Social and claimed in a post that it was likely that such employees had come across documents at Mar-a-Lago, but maintained, as he has throughout the case, that he was within his rights to take the documents and keep them at the resort.
Newsweek reached out to representatives for Trump via email for comment.
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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