described. you know, he is right. they re looking for anthrax, biological, chemical agents. they re looking for bombs, guns, knives. but they re not looking for, you know, what we would have called a dime bag, i m sure more than that now of powder in a ziploc. now they are looking for whose print is on the plastic bag? whose skin cell dna might have been left behind? is it in a government record? if they are a staff member, military person, somebody like that the odds are if they can recover it from the bag it is. it could be a reporter who was there for an interview, a citizen there for a special tour arranged by the white house staff. but there are logs, cameras, records. so there are cameras. you are saying, would there be cameras in that room? right. there are cameras in that room and those cubbies where if you are going into the room, you have to take your cell phones and put them in there. unless this person took this
that alex relate to the 190 or so items that the former president returned to the national archives, voluntarily, on january 2022. one year after he left office. and so, if donald trump had returned all of the hundreds of other classified documents, and other related government record, then he wouldn t be faced with these charges. this is a matter of donald trump s own making. and no lawyer from parlatore, or whoever decides to take up this case going forward, contains that. he wrote this himself. which begs the question, why keep these documents? but i m curious also what you can tell us about the role that your former boss, merrick garland, is playing in all this. considering the special counsel rules require that he be kept informed of all of the major steps in the investigation. right. that s right, he has had and roll as you note, the
so, you don t need to you don t need to know, sitting here, exactly what that document was, to know that donald trump, if he does not have an answer to what that document was doing in his desk, a legal answer, that is a crime for that document to be in his desk. that is not necessarily true. okay? you do need to know what the document is. okay? simply the fact that it has a classification marking on it, if it does have a classification working on it, doesn t make it automatically some type of contraband. it has to be national defense information, one. two, under the presidential records act, we re talking about original documents. not a single one of those marked documents are originals. they are all copies. every single one of them. now, when we talk about, you know, for example, if he has the original letter from kim jong-un in his desk, that would definitely be a government record, because that s the original. and so under the presidential records act, which makes a dist
for that document to be in his desk. that is not necessarily true. okay? you do need to know what the document is. okay? simply the fact that it has a classification marking on, if it does have a classification working on it, doesn t make it automatically some type of it has to be national defense information, number one. two, under the presidential records act, we re talking about original documents. not a single one of those marked documents are originals. they are all copies. every single one of them. now, when we talk about, you know, for example, if he has the original letter from kim jong-un in his desk, that would definitely be a government record, because that s the original. and so under the presidential records act, which makes a distinction between originals and copies, then you can talk about whether he is possessing a government record. but whether that is classified or not does not really matter so much as, does it constitute national defense information?
and copies, then you can talk about whether he is possessing a government record. but whether that is classified or not does not really matter so much as, does it constitute national defense information? and so, if he has a photocopy of a document, even if it does have a classification marking on it, but it does not constitute national defense information, or if it was the declassified, if it s not currently national defense information than, no, that smokiest wouldn t be the smokiest gun. okay. i want to go back to your point, which is correct in the justice department s approach to this, which is, classification is not important to them in this investigation and the reason right. it s not part of the statute. that s right. and the reason for that is that the heaviest statute that they cited in obtaining that search warrant, 18 usc, section 1519,