(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) The Biden Justice Department’s partisan Mar-a-Lago fishing expedition will run into a Clinton-era legal snag, according to a report by Just the News’s John Solomon.
Judge’s ruling over audio tapes hidden in Bill Clinton’s sock drawer could significantly impact Donald Trump’s effort to contest FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago | Just The News https://t.co/MBCisbJ1rg
— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) August 18, 2022
In conversation with anonymous government lawyers regarding the FBI’s unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Solomon was directed to a 2012 case in which a federal judge ruled that the president has the power to declassify or make “personal” any records from his time in office that he chooses.
In Judicial Watch v. National Archives and Records Administration, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, held that a Freedom of Information Act request could not force the National Archives to compel a former president to release records from his time in office due to a loophole in the Presidential Records Act.
The government accountability watchdog had sued to obtain copies of secret audio recordings that President Bill Clinton had kept in his sock drawer, which he later used to write his autobiography.
“Under the statutory scheme established by the PRA, the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President’s term and in his sole discretion,” Berman wrote in a footnote.
Berman argued, further, that the president “is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, [and therefore has the] authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records.”
Kevin Brock, former assistant FBI director for intelligence, told Solomon that the DOJ’s arguments in justification of the raid must give other former presidents pause.
“[The warrant] apparently makes a novel legal assertion that any presidential record kept by a former president is against the law,” Brock said. “You have to wonder what the other living former presidents think about that.”
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Solomon that Berman’s ruling showed that there are two standards of justice according to which the deep-state DOJ operates: one for Republicans, and another for Democrats.
“The Justice Department previously had told us in response to a question about Bill Clinton: ‘Tough luck, it’s his,'” Fitton said. “But they changed their mind for Donald Trump?”
To date, despite the best efforts of a selectively leaky DOJ and a compliant media to hype the story, no evidence has been released which shows that the documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago are anything other than legitimately declassified (or never classified) personal records.
Or if they're going to leak, we demand better leaks! Not just mention of word "nuclear" or some Trump lawyer who signed something that might have been wrong. Something that would justify Garland ripping the country apart with a criminal case against Trump himself. https://t.co/vfwPgvbyVN
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) August 17, 2022
