State of the Union: Interview With Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY)
Interview
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Well, that is true. As president, when he is a sitting president, he can -- he has classified vacation authority and can declassify documents.
After he leaves the Oval Office, he cannot do so. So the question then becomes, did he know whether or not these documents were classified or did he declassify them? And you quoted a couple of lines in the indictment. And, by the way, this is as devastating and specific of an indictment that I think I have ever seen. And I drafted a fair number of them to present to a grand jury when I was a federal prosecutor.
But when Donald Trump is showing military plans to those who don't have security clearances somewhere at Trump Bedminster, which is not a secure location, he referred to the document. He said: "Except it is, like, highly confidential."
Then he says "secret. This is secret information." He says: "Yes, we will have to try to declassify it. As president, I could have declassified it. Now I can't. But this is still a secret."
So there is no question, based on his private, recorded conversations, that he did not declassify these documents. Mr. Jordan and Donald Trump and his defense team can try to spin this any way they want, but the evidence, based on his own recording, his own voice, says to the contrary.
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No, I think, as this plays out and you start to realize what the point of a special counsel is -- I don't hear anyone complaining that there's a special counsel that was appointed, John Durham, to investigate Crossfire Hurricane, or a special counsel that was appointed to investigate the president.
The point of the special counsel is that it is independent from the administration. And what you're basically saying here with this argument is that, if anyone announces that they are running for president, that they cannot be charged.
That is preposterous. And Mr. Jordan cites the rule of law, but he's got it backwards. The rule of law in this country says that we are a government of laws, not people, and that no one is above the law. When you read this indictment and you think to yourself, man, this person should not be charged with it, the only person that should -- you're basically saying, as Mr. Jordan is, that Mr. Trump is above the law.
And that is not how our rule of law works. That's not how our system works.
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Absolutely. Absolutely.
I think it's very important that the special counsel do a thorough investigation to determine whether President Biden willfully concealed classified information and knew that he was doing it. And that's the critical distinction here between Mr. Trump and former
Vice President Pence, President Biden, Secretary Clinton, is that there was no evidence that they willfully concealed material that was national defense information and that they attempted to obstruct the efforts by the National Archives and the Department of Justice to retrieve that information.
When Vice President Pence learned he had that information, when President Biden learned that he had that information, they immediately notified the authorities and turned it back over. And that's the critical distinction here that Mr. Jordan wants to ignore and all of the House Republicans want to ignore in their whataboutism.
Unless there's evidence of knowingly and intentionally holding this information that is material to the national defense, then there is no criminal charge.
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Well, that was not Jack Smith who made that decision. That was a district court judge who determined that those conversations were -- pursuant to the crime-fraud exception, were exempt from the attorney-client privilege.
And that's why they used it, not because Jack Smith decided to use it, but because a district court judge -- and I believe it was appealed to the Court of Appeals as well. The judiciary decided that that was fair game for them. But that is just one piece of many, many damning pieces of evidence.
You have recordings. You have text messages. You have video surveillance. You obviously have testimony.
This is an overwhelmingly devastating indictment that demonstrated Donald Trump believed the law does not apply to him, and that he would do anything he could to conceal and maintain possession of highly, highly classified national security information that would jeopardize our national security and would jeopardize the good men and women of the United States intelligence community who risk their lives to gather that information.
This is of serious, serious importance to our national security.
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Thank you, Dana.
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