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Live updates: Federal indictment against Trump unsealed in the documents probe
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As part of the indictment, prosecutors point to several of former President Donald Trump’s public statements, illustrating how he understood how classified information was supposed to be handled under the law.
Several of the statements highlighted by prosecutors are from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump repeatedly lambasted the mishandling of classified information and said that he would aggressively enforce laws surrounding their protection if elected.
“In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information,” Trump said in August 2016. “No one will be above the law.”
“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified,” Trump said in another campaign trail statement, according to the indictment.
The indictment also points to a statement that Trump made as president in 2018: “I have a unique, Constitutional responsibility to protect the Nation’s classified information,” he said.
Trump went on to say, according to the indictment, that “such access [to national secrets] is particularly inappropriate when former officials have transitioned into highly partisan positions and seek to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate their political attacks. Any access granted to our Nation’s secrets should be in furtherance of national, not personal, interests.”
CNN has previously reported that a former career White House official who was in charge of advising the Trump and Barack Obama administrations on the declassification process testified to the special counsel that Trump knew the proper process for declassifying documents and followed it correctly at times while in office.
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