On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba sat down with Charlie Kirk to discuss the Department of Justice’s recent filing in opposition to having a special master appointed to independently review the documents taken from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this month.
Speaking first about a photo of classified and top secret documents gathered during the raid that was included in the DOJ’s Tuesday night filing, Habba said, "I love staged photo ops."
"I mean, it’s amazing how they specifically placed in response," Habba continued, with Kirk noting the Time magazine cover off to the side of the image.
"But they’re arguing that everything is too sensitive, so we can’t have a special master. It was top secret, but they can put exhibit F, which is the picture of all the top secret documents laid out strategically on the floor and that’s not a problem,” said Habba.
"It’s a typical 'we are trying to backup our story because we don’t have one image' is my perspective of that,” she added.
"Yeah, I mean, they put the Time Magazine image that says 'knock knock.' This is a staged political propaganda photo op by a supposedly neutral law enforcement agency," Kirk said.
Kirk continued on to ask Habba whether it’s true that a sitting president can declassify any document of his choosing.
"Correct," Habba responded. "Actually, in the Department of Justice’s papers that they filed at midnight last night, you can see on page two that they can see that this is part of the Presidential records Act, which gave the presidents, all presidents, the right to declassify documents, label them, some as personal, some declassified, which go to the archives, which go to the Presidential Library, and they say themselves in the papers that they filed that this is under the Presidential Records Act."
"What they did was to try and criminalize Donald Trump as they always do, they found these three mundane statutes, espionage and the two others, obstructions, and they’re trying to claim that there was some sort of criminal activity, but their papers say it’s under the Presidential Records Act.
"Your admission is the power that we’ve all been saying he does have. So you can take a picture of top secret documents, Charlie, and show the world a label, but if they’re declassified as he has the right to do that, he has the right to have them and he would would working together with NARA, as we know, and that back and forth could have been done at a table as they had been doing for months prior," Habba concluded.
"This is a clerical dispute over a potential overdue library book that they are now raiding a president's home over," Kirk added, before asking Habba about where the issue stands currently on the Trump side of things in regards to countersuits and indictments.
"Well, I think we're always again, hyper aggressive anything. If you're Donald Trump's attorneys, you're used to this hyper-aggressive witch hunt in his words. Right?” said Habba.
"For us, here's the reality of the situation. There's a great team in place that is handling this. And I'm lucky to work with wonderful people, but they have a good grasp on what's going on, they're in communications obviously. There are several attorneys on this team.
“Right now. We're waiting for tomorrow. We have that special master request. I'm really happy that we have a judge that is engaged, that is asking to have a hearing, and will ask questions. I'm frankly pleased with their papers that they filed because I think they made their own bed.
“At this point, I hope we get a special master. I know that the papers have already been rifled through but I would like to see what they've taken because we don't even know what they've taken. We do know there was privileged documents there. They've admitted that. They took passports. I want to see how wide they went.
Habba continued on to state that the team will be looking at Fourth Amendment violations, because "anybody, not a president, but more so president, has a right to protect their home," adding that the search warrant was "overly broad."
"So I think there will be definitely some counter actions and filings by our team once we go through the procedural ramifications that we have to do first,” Habba concluded.
