Real Clear Investigations is now tweeting further questions Sperry has about the affidavit that was made public on Friday but with redactions. If Twitter sees it as an effort to avoid a suspension, they might be the next to get a ban.
Sperry identifies many anomalies in the affidavit that raise issues for him.
They allude to “classified marks” on the papers that were discovered in the 15 boxes. That raises the likelihood that they have been declassified and are no longer classified. The affidavit claims that the papers “appear” to contain National Defense Information, but Sperry questions wouldn’t they know for sure if they “triaged” the boxes.
There is a sentence that states that there is “probable reason to think evidence of obstruction will be located at the premises.” However, Sperry notes that there is no header about that “obstruction” or anything else in the portions that have not been censored that would support this random remark. The agent who signed the statement asserts that he didn’t think Mar-a-Lago’s storage room and other locations were “currently” approved for the keeping of secret material. Did he not realize that either they were or they weren’t? And were they in the past rather than the present?
The DOJ then instructed Trump’s legal team in a letter dated June 8 that they must retain the papers in the storage facility until further notice, according to the affidavit.
So why do they urge them to store the papers there even though it seems like it wouldn’t be a safe location? They don’t start taking them right away. They hold off till the August 8 raid, almost two months? When they removed the initial crates, why not take them all as well? That appears to disprove the idea that there was any sense of urgency in this situation.
Naturally, they were aware of what was there since they instructed the Trump campaign to leave it in place. Sperry takes it as perhaps attempting to trap Trump using the DOJ’s instructions. Why didn’t they just arrange for NARA to pick them up? It would be difficult to hold Trump accountable for what the DOJ instructed them to do if they were advised to keep them there by the DOJ and then later stated it was incorrect.
