Former President Donald Trump recently bragged about a folder of “cool memorabilia” he removed from the White House as “evidence from heaven,” a former Army prosecutor said Sunday.
Trump admitted in a post on Truth Social last week that he kept “hundreds of folders” marked “secret” or “classified” — but said he did not keep the documents he seized.
They are “cool memories,” he said.
Trump baselessly insinuated that the “Gestapo” – apparently the FBI agents who collected the actual classified documents from Mar-a-Lago last year, according to photographic evidence – may have counted the empty folders as documents.
Authorities recovered 300 pages of classified documents, 48 empty folders marked as containing classified material and 42 folders that once contained documents that should be “returned[ed] to the staff secretary/military aide,” according to a preliminary inventory, The New York Times reported.
MSNBC host Katie Phang spoke Sunday about Trump’s “memories,” saying: “We know that Donald Trump … is his worst enemy. He cannot be silent.”
Phang’s guest, former Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, called Trump’s bragging post “evidence from heaven to prosecutors … Special Counsel Jack Smith is investigating this exact crime, classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.”
Kirschner noted that “everything” that Trump said and “everything that he sent is what is said to be admitted by the opposing party. It is non-hearsay. It comes as dangerous information.”
Trump said, “on the one hand, the FBI planted [classified documents]; on the other hand, okay, if they exist, I declassified them with thoughts. In the next post, you know, just some empty folders, [which] we know that’s not true,” Kirschner said.
“All this can play into a certain part of the [Trump’s political] base,” he added. “You know who won’t play? When the prosecutor lines everything up and gives it to 12 people in the jury box. It won’t play for the jury,” said Kirschner.
A folder clearly marked “Classified” was displayed in September at a bar in the lobby of Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue late last year. Displayed next to the “Classified” folder is a “Situation Room” brochure marked “unclassified FOUO” – meaning “for official use only.”
FOUO information “must be handled in a manner that provides assurance that unauthorized persons do not gain access,” according to federal guidelines. Former FBI official Peter Strzok pointed out in a tweet that the bar “certainly not official usage.”
Check out what Kirschner had to say in the interview here: