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Tag: Subpoenas

  • GOP-led committees plan to issue subpoenas in Biden probes without consulting Democrats | CNN Politics

    GOP-led committees plan to issue subpoenas in Biden probes without consulting Democrats | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee and select subcommittee on the so-called weaponization of the federal government plan to adopt a rule that will allow Republican members to issue subpoenas without consulting Democrats days ahead of time, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

    The plan, articulated to GOP members of the select subcommittee by its top Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio during their first meeting Friday, will expedite the subpoena process as both panels move forward with probes of the Biden administration, two of the sources said.

    It reflects the “urgency” of Republican plans to investigate the Biden administration on several fronts, the sources added.

    A third source told CNN that the move will effectively allow Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee and select subcommittee to unilaterally issue subpoenas.

    In doing so, Republicans are taking a page from Democrats and former Oversight Committee chairman, Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who previously waived rules that required members of the opposite party be consulted before subpoenas were issued.

    At the time, Republicans slammed the decision by Democrats as a violation of the bipartisan agreement that governs the subpoena process for certain House committees.

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  • Giuliani subpoenaed amid special counsel investigation into Trump’s fundraising | CNN Politics

    Giuliani subpoenaed amid special counsel investigation into Trump’s fundraising | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into the former president’s fundraising following the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the subpoena.

    The subpoena, which was sent more than a month ago and has not been previously reported, requests documents from Giuliani about payments he received around the 2020 election, when Giuliani filed numerous lawsuits on Trump’s behalf contesting the election results, the person said.

    Prosecutors have also subpoenaed other witnesses who are close to Trump, asking specifically for documents related to disbursements from the Save America PAC, Trump’s primary fundraising operation set up shortly after the 2020 election, according to other sources with insight into the probe.

    Taken together, the subpoenas demonstrate prosecutors’ growing interest in following the money after the 2020 election as part of their sweeping criminal probe around Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss of the presidency.

    Save America was part of broader fundraising efforts by Trump and the Republican Party that raised more than $250 million after the election. Since then, the political action committee has compensated several lawyers who now represent Trump and his allies in January 6-related investigations.

    The subpoenas to other witnesses in addition to Giuliani were sent in late December, according to the other sources.

    The information the prosecutors seek is still being collected, the sources said. With Giuliani, the investigators have prioritized getting financial information from him, one person said.

    The inquiry to Giuliani came from David Rody, a former top prosecutor in New York who specializes in gang and conspiracy cases and is assisting Smith with examining a broader criminal conspiracy after the election, according to some of the sources.

    In response to being informed of CNN’s reporting on Giuliani’s subpoena and asked for a statement, Ted Goodman, his adviser, said, “The mayor is unaware of the specific claims by this so-called ‘anonymous source,’ and therefore is not in position to respond.”

    A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

    A representative for Trump has not responded to a request for comment.

    CNN previously reported the Justice Department in September subpoenaed witnesses for financial details about the Save America PAC, and that a portion of Smith’s office would dig into possible financial and campaign contribution crimes. The Giuliani subpoena and other December subpoenas represent a new round of inquiry, now from Smith’s office, which took shape over the holidays.

    After the election, Trump and the Republican National Committee raked in millions of dollars as they told supporters the election was being stolen, marketing the fundraising effort as election defense. At the time, some officials working on the fundraising effort knew that Joe Biden’s electoral win was legitimate, despite Trump’s insistence it was fraudulent, the House Select Committee found in its own investigation.

    Smith’s office hasn’t brought any charges. Federal prosecutors in New York previously investigated Giuliani for activities in Ukraine during the Trump presidency. While that led to prosecutors accessing his electronic devices, they declined to charge him with any crime.

    Giuliani is likely to be a central figure in any probe of Trump’s close political circles after the election. After serving as Trump’s private attorney during the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the former chief federal prosecutor and mayor of Manhattan dove into Trump’s attempts to claim electoral victory. He unsuccessfully argued a case before a federal judge in Pennsylvania – where Trump sought to throw out the popular vote – and connected with state lawmakers as he tried to convince them of election fraud.

    In the weeks after the 2020 election, Giuliani also held freewheeling press conferences, repeating allegations that he never could prove.

    A Trump campaign attorney told the January 6 committee that Giuliani had asked to be paid $20,000 a day for his post-election work for Trump. The campaign declined to pay him that, according to election and House select committee public records.

    Subpoenas issued last year to a wide swath of Trump-connected witnesses also asked questions about the Save America PAC, including how its funds were used in 2020 and early 2021, and about Giuliani, as CNN previously reported.

    Giuliani hasn’t personally received distributions directly from the PAC, according to campaign finance records. Yet his company, Giuliani Partners, was paid $63,400 for travel reimbursement by Trump’s campaign committee in mid-December 2020. Giuliani’s New York-based security company also received a $76,500 payment from another Trump-backed entity, the Make America Great Again PAC, for travel expenses, in early February 2021, according to the records.

    In addition to the financial inquiry, Smith’s office is also pursuing possible criminal cases around the Trump campaign’s use of fake electors in battleground states and the pressure on Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election’s result. In all of those schemes, Giuliani was a central player.

    In his House select committee testimony, Giuliani explained that his team working with Trump pivoted to focus on state legislatures that could block the election result after his attempts failed in the courts. The New York state bar suspended him from practicing law because of his 2020 election efforts, and he’s also facing an attorney discipline proceeding in Washington, DC.

    He declined to answer some questions the House asked about his work for Trump after the election, citing attorney confidentiality. Giuliani could try to make similar claims in the federal investigation, though the Justice Department has legal mechanisms in which it can try to overcome witness refusals to answer questions.

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  • Jan. 6 panel drops Trump subpoena as it wraps up work

    Jan. 6 panel drops Trump subpoena as it wraps up work

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee has dropped its subpoena against former President Donald Trump as it wraps up work and prepares to dissolve next week.

    Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s Democratic chairman, wrote in a letter to Trump lawyer David Warrington on Wednesday that he is formally withdrawing the subpoena.

    “As you may know, the Select Committee has concluded its hearings, released its final report and will very soon reach its end,” Thompson wrote. “In light of the imminent end of our investigation, the Select Committee can no longer pursue the specific information covered by the subpoena.”

    The committee had voted to subpoena Trump during its final televised hearing before the midterm elections in October, demanding testimony and documents from the former president as it has investigated his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection and efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat.

    Lawmakers on the panel have acknowledged the subpoena would be difficult to enforce, especially as Republicans are poised to take over the House in January. But the move had political and symbolic value.

    “We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion,” Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice chairwoman and one of two Republicans on the nine-member committee, said at the time. “And every American is entitled to those answers.”

    Trump then sued the panel in November to avoid cooperating. The lawsuit contended that while former presidents have voluntarily agreed to provide testimony or documents in response to congressional subpoenas in the past, “no president or former president has ever been compelled to do so.”

    The committee’s request for documents was sweeping, including personal communications between Trump and members of Congress as well as extremist groups. Trump’s attorneys said it was overly broad and framed it as an infringement of his First Amendment rights.

    While the panel never gained Trump’s testimony, the committee interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, including most of his closest White House aides and allies. Many of those witnesses provided substantive detail about his efforts to sway state legislators, federal officials and lawmakers to help him overturn his defeat. And White House aides who were with him on Jan. 6 told the panel about his resistance to tell the violent mob of his supporters to leave the Capitol after they had broken in and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

    In its final report issued last week, the committee concluded that Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to upend the 2020 election and failed to act on the violence. The panel also recommended that the Justice Department investigate the former president for four separate crimes, including aiding an insurrection.

    On social media Wednesday evening, Trump and his lawyers construed the move as a victory. “They probably did so because they knew I did nothing wrong, or they were about to lose in Court,” Trump wrote on his social media site. He called the panel “political Thugs.”

    On Twitter, Trump lawyer Harmeet Dhillon said the panel had “waved the white flag.”

    ___

    Follow AP’s coverage of the Jan. 6 committee at: https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege

    ___

    Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

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  • As House January 6 committee winds down, it is abandoning efforts to subpoena phone records | CNN Politics

    As House January 6 committee winds down, it is abandoning efforts to subpoena phone records | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The House select committee investigating the Capitol riot is dropping several of its pursuits for January 6-related phone records, according to court filings this week, as the panel winds down before it expires at the end of this year.

    The committee sent out dozens of subpoenas seeking call logs, including to major phone companies, as part of its investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result. But several Trump allies sued, contesting the committee’s authority, and Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile agreed not to turn over any data to the House while those lawsuits were litigated in court. Few of the cases have been resolved.

    That means the House select committee will not be able to incorporate in its final report without some of the information it long sought about the communications of top witnesses around Donald Trump and the White House in late 2020 and January 2021. The panel plans to release the report next week.

    This week, the committee withdrew its phone-records subpoenas related to Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, White House aide Stephen Miller, elections attorney Cleta Mitchell, conservative political activist Roger Stone, some January 6 Capitol riot defendants and Amy Harris, a photojournalist who spent time with top members of the Proud Boys around January 6, 2021, according to filings in seven House subpoena challenges that were pending in the DC District Court.

    “On December 12, 2022, Plaintiffs were informed by counsel for the Select Committee that the Select Committee will be withdrawing the subject subpoena issued by the Committee,” one court filing, from lawyers representing members of the Oath Keepers extremist group, wrote in one recent request to drop a lawsuit.

    Some of the subpoenas were issued a year ago.

    The committee declined to comment.

    While these witnesses and some others successfully blocked the committee from obtaining their phone records, the panel was able to access unprecedented amounts of information in their investigation, including through other phone records subpoenas, other document requests and witness interviews. Some of that information was on display in a series of public hearings over the summer.

    Even after the public hearings, the committee tried to collect more data as it wrapped up its work this year. For example, the committee won access to Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward’s phone data after she lost a challenge in court and the Supreme Court declined to get involved.

    But they never got all of the phone records they sought from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who over the past year became one of the committee’s top pursuits.

    After turning over some 2,000 text messages to the committee, Meadows lost a court case challenging committee subpoenas for his phone records and for his testimony. Yet Meadows is still trying to challenge those subpoenas in court, leaving the House with little ability to force him to testify before the end of the Congress.

    Another subpoena target, Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, said in a statement the committee had informed his lawyer it is withdrawing a subpoena for his phone records. He has been challenging the subpoena to Verizon for his phone logs since last December. Alexander noted that he did testify for hours before the committee and later before a federal grand jury investigating January 6 and efforts to overturn the election.

    “I did nothing wrong except to exercise my First Amendment rights to protest the fraud that occurred in the 2020 election,” Alexander said in the statement.

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  • Warnings on gay club shooter stir questions about old case

    Warnings on gay club shooter stir questions about old case

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    DENVER — A California woman who warned a judge last year about the danger posed by the suspect in the Colorado Springs gay nightclub shooting said Friday that the deaths could have been prevented if earlier charges against the suspect weren’t dismissed.

    Jeanie Streltzoff — a relative of alleged shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich — urged Colorado Judge Robin Chittum in a letter last November to incarcerate the suspect following a 2021 standoff with SWAT teams that uncovered a stockpile of more than 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of explosive material, firearms and ammunition.

    Aldrich should have been in prison at the time of the shooting and prevented from obtaining weapons, she told The Associated Press on Friday.

    “Five people died,” Streltzoff said, hushing the final word. “Someone should have done something.”

    Streltzoff blamed Aldrich’s grandmother and mother for dodging subpoenas that would have forced them to testify in the bomb threat case. But documents unsealed Thursday also raised questions about whether authorities were aggressive enough in their pursuit of a conviction or could have sought different charges when it became clear Aldrich’s mother, Laura Voepel, and grandparents Jonathan and Pamela Pullen wouldn’t testify.

    The case was derailed because prosecutors couldn’t properly serve subpoenas to the Pullens, who had moved to Florida, and Voepel, who was still in Colorado Springs, and ran out of time under fair trial rules, according to District Attorney Michael Allen and court documents.

    George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley said he found the district attorney’s explanations of why he dropped the case “incomplete” and was surprised Allen didn’t amend the charges to involve the threat to the police and community.

    “This was a potential crime that didn’t just solely impact the grandparents,” Turley said. “This was a three hour standoff. This was disruptive. The police were threatened.”

    It’s rare for a criminal case to fall apart over a failure to deliver subpoenas to a couple victims or witnesses, Turley said. He also noted that police and prosecutors have enhanced abilities to access property and serve people in criminal cases.

    Aldrich, 22, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns according to defense attorneys, was initially charged with kidnapping and other felonies in the 2021 case.

    Court documents describe how Aldrich told frightened grandparents about firearms and bomb-making material in their basement, talked of plans to become the “next mass killer,” and vowed not to let them interfere with plans to “go out in a blaze.” Aldrich livestreamed on Facebook a subsequent confrontation with SWAT teams at the house of mother Laura Voepel.

    Former deputy district attorney Mark Waller, who ran against Allen in the last election, said prosecutors should have amended charges to obstruction of justice, given that Aldrich was deemed so dangerous a SWAT team and bomb squad had to be deployed and surrounding homes evacuated.

    “They have that video of (Aldrich) saying he’s going to blow everything up. They could have easily charged … obstruction of justice,” said Waller. “It could have prevented this whole thing from happening.”

    A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, Howard Black, said “numerous” attempts were made to serve subpoenas in the case but did not provide further details.

    About a week before the case was dismissed, a lawyer for Pamela Pullen asked the court to quash, or reject, a subpoena that had been left in her mailbox. It’s not clear when that subpoena had been left for her. Black said it was “just one attempt of many” to subpoena Pullen.

    He dismissed the idea prosecutors could have pursued charges for the harm caused to neighbors during the bomb scare, noting that evacuations happen a lot. Prosecutors filed charges based on the evidence they had and what they ethically believed they could prove in court, Black said.

    Pullen’s attorney in the bomb threat case, Aaron Gaddis, did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment. Phone calls to Pamela and Jonathan Pullen have not been returned.

    Jonathan Pullen is Streltzoff’s brother and Aldrich’s step-grandfather. Streltzoff said he is a “gentle soul” who had lived in fear of his grandchild for years.

    In the letter Streltzoff and her older brother, Robert Pullen, wrote to the court in November 2021, they detailed multiple instances of Aldrich menacing their brother, who they said “lived in a virtual prison.”

    Aldrich punched holes in the walls of the grandparents’ Colorado home and broke windows, and the grandparents “had to sleep in their bedroom with the door locked” and a bat by the bed, they wrote. They also said Pamela Pullen gave Aldrich $30,000, used to buy a 3D printer to make gun parts.

    Streltzoff said Aldrich was treated with “kid gloves” by their grandmother “no matter what” they did.

    During Aldrich’s teenage years in San Antonio, the letter said Aldrich attacked Jonathan Pullen and sent him to the emergency room with undisclosed injuries. Jonathan Pullen later lied to police out of fear of Aldrich, according to the letter, which also said the suspect could not get along with classmates as a youth so had been homeschooled.

    Streltzoff said Friday from the doorway of her Southern California home that the letter actually underplayed how menacing Aldrich was. She said they had “terrorized my younger brother for years.”

    She hasn’t seen Jonathan Pullen since 2010 and has lost touch with him since the bomb scare. He hasn’t returned her recent call and text messages and her other brother hasn’t spoken with him.

    “No one knows where they are now,” Streltzoff said.

    Aldrich tried to reclaim guns seized by authorities after the 2021 threat, but they were not returned, according to Allen. But soon after the charges were dropped, Aldrich boasted of having regained firearms and showed former roommate Xavier Kraus two rifles, body armor and incendiary rounds, Kraus told AP.

    Aldrich was formally charged Tuesday with 305 criminal counts, including hate crimes and murder, in the Nov. 19 shooting at Club Q, a sanctuary for the LGBTQ community in mostly conservative Colorado Springs.

    Investigators say Aldrich entered just before midnight with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle and began shooting during a drag queen’s birthday celebration. Patrons stopped the killing by wrestling the suspect to the ground and beating Aldrich into submission, witnesses said.

    ————

    Melley reported from Los Angeles and Condon from New York. Matthew Brown contributed from Billings, Mont.

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  • Club shooter’s 2021 bomb case dropped, family uncooperative

    Club shooter’s 2021 bomb case dropped, family uncooperative

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    COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Colorado Springs gay nightclub shooter had charges dropped in a 2021 bomb threat case after family members who were terrorized in the incident refused to cooperate, according to the district attorney and unsealed court documents.

    The charges were dropped despite authorities a finding a tub with more than 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of explosive materials and later receiving warnings from other relatives that suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich was sure to hurt or murder a set of grandparents if freed, according to the documents, which were unsealed Thursday.

    In a letter last November to state District Court Judge Robin Chittum, the relatives painted a picture of an isolated, violent person who did not have a job and was given $30,000 that was spent largely on the purchase of 3D printers to make guns. Chittum is the same judge who ruled to unseal the case Thursday.

    Aldrich tried to reclaim guns seized after the threat, but authorities did not return the weapons, El Paso County District Attorney Michael Allen said. The case included allegations that Aldrich threatened to kill the grandparents in a chilling confrontation in which he said the suspect planned become the “next mass killer” more than a year before the nightclub attack that killed five people.

    The suspect’s mother and the grandparents derailed that earlier case by evading prosecutors’ efforts to serve them with a subpoena, leading to a dismissal of the charges after defense attorneys said speedy trial rules were at risk, Allen said.

    Testifying at a hearing two months after the threat, the suspect’s mother and grandmother described Aldrich in court as a “loving” and “sweet” young person who did not deserve to be jailed, the prosecutor said.

    The former district attorney who was replaced by Allen told The Associated Press he faced many cases in which people dodged subpoenas, but the inability to serve Aldrich’s family seemed extraordinary.

    “I don’t know that they were hiding, but if that was the case, shame on them,” Dan May said of the suspect’s family. “This is an extreme example of apparent manipulation that has resulted in something horrible.”

    Aldrich’s attorney, public defender Joseph Archambault, had argued against the document release, saying Aldrich’s right to a fair trial was paramount.

    “This will make sure there is no presumption of innocence,” Archambault said.

    The grandmother’s in-laws wrote to the court in November 2021 saying Alrich was a continuing danger and should remain incarcerated. The letter also said police tried to hold Aldrich for 72 hours after a prior response to the home, but the grandmother intervened.

    “We believe that my brother, and his wife, would undergo bodily harm or more if Anderson were released. Besides being incarcerated, we believe Anderson needs therapy and counseling,” Robert Pullen and Jeanie Streltzoff wrote. They said Aldrich had punched holes in the walls of the grandparents’ Colorado home and broken windows and that the grandparents “had to sleep in their bedroom with the door locked” and a bat by the bed.

    During Aldrich’s teenage years in San Antonio, the letter said, Aldrich attacked the grandfather and sent him to the emergency room with undisclosed injuries. The grandfather later lied to police out of fear of Aldrich, according to the letter, which said the suspect could not get along with classmates as a youth so had been homeschooled.

    The judge’s order came after news organizations, including the AP, sought to unseal the documents, and two days after the AP published portions of the documents that were verified with a law enforcement official.

    Aldrich, 22, was arrested in June 2021 on allegations of making a threat that led to the evacuation of about 10 homes. The documents describe how Aldrich told the frightened grandparents about firearms and bomb-making material in the grandparents’ basement and vowed not to let them interfere with plans for Aldrich to be “the next mass killer” and “go out in a blaze.”

    Aldrich — who uses they/them pronouns and is nonbinary, according to their attorneys — holed up in their mother’s home in a standoff with SWAT teams and warned about having armor-piercing rounds and a determination to “go to the end.” Investigators later searched the mother’s and grandparents’ houses and found and seized handguns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, body armor, magazines, a gas mask and a 12-gallon tub with explosive chemicals.

    The tub had bags with an estimated 113 pounds (51 kilograms) of ammonium nitrate and packets of aluminum powder that are explosive when combined, the documents show.

    The bags were labeled “Tannerite,” a brand of legal exploding targets used for sighting rifles, documents show. The unregulated material has been used in bombings and attacks, including in 2016 with bombs placed in New York City and New Jersey. The Las Vegas gunman who killed 58 people in 2017 suspect had 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of Tannerite in his car.

    A sheriff’s report said there had been prior calls to law enforcement referring to Aldrich’s “escalating homicidal behavior” but did not elaborate. A sheriff’s office spokesperson did not immediately provide more information.

    The grandparents’ call to 911 led to the suspect’s arrest, and Aldrich was booked into jail on suspicion of felony menacing and kidnapping. But after their bond was set at $1 million, Aldrich’s mother and grandparents sought to lower the bond, which was reduced to $100,000 with conditions including therapy.

    The case was dropped when attempts to serve the family members with subpoenas to testify against Aldrich failed, according to Allen. Both grandparents moved out of state, complicating the subpoena process, Allen said.

    Grandmother Pamela Pullen said through an attorney that there was a subpoena in her mailbox, but it was never handed to her personally or served properly, documents show.

    “At the end of the day, they weren’t going to testify against Andy,” Xavier Kraus, a former friend and neighbor of Aldrich, told the AP.

    Kraus said he had text messages from Aldrich’s mother saying she and the suspect were “hiding from somebody.” He later found out the family had been dodging subpoenas. Aldrich’s “words were, ‘They got nothing. There’s no evidence,’” Kraus said.

    A protective order against the suspect that was in place until July 5 prevented Aldrich from possessing firearms, the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office said.

    Soon after the charges were dropped, Aldrich began boasting that they had regained access to firearms, Kraus said, adding that Aldrich had shown him two assault-style rifles, body armor and incendiary rounds.

    Aldrich “was really excited about it,” Kraus said, and slept with a rifle nearby under a blanket.

    Relatives of Aldrich’s grandmother said after the suspect’s 2021 arrest that she had recently given Aldrich $30,000, “much of which went to his purchase of two 3D printers — on which he was making guns,” according to documents in the case.

    Aldrich’s statements in the bomb case raised questions about whether authorities could have used Colorado’s “red flag” law to seize weapons from the suspect.

    El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder released a statement Thursday saying there was no need to ask for a red flag order because Aldrich’s weapons had already been seized as part of the arrest and Aldrich couldn’t buy new ones.

    The sheriff also rejected the idea that he could have asked for a red flag order after the case was dismissed. The bombing case was too old to argue there was danger in the near future, Elder said, and the evidence was sealed a month after the dismissal and could not be used.

    “There was no legal mechanism” to take guns following the case dismissal, the sheriff said.

    Under Colorado law, records are automatically sealed when a case is dropped and defendants are not prosecuted, as happened in Aldrich’s 2021 case. Once sealed, officials cannot acknowledge that the records exist, and the process to unseal the documents initially happens behind closed doors with no docket to follow and an unnamed judge.

    Chittum said the “profound” public interest in the case outweighed Aldrich’s privacy rights. The judge added that scrutiny of judicial cases is “foundational to our system of government.”

    During Thursday’s hearing, Aldrich sat at the defense table looking straight ahead or down at times and did not appear to show any reaction when their mother’s lawyer asked that the case remain sealed.

    Aldrich was formally charged Tuesday with 305 criminal counts, including hate crimes and murder, in the Nov. 19 shooting at Club Q, a sanctuary for the LGBTQ community in mostly conservative Colorado Springs.

    Investigators say Aldrich entered just before midnight with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle and began shooting during a drag queen’s birthday celebration. Patrons stopped the killing by wrestling the suspect to the ground and beating Aldrich into submission, witnesses said.

    Seventeen people suffered gunshot wounds but survived, authorities said.

    ———

    Mustian, Balsamo and Condon reported from New York, and Bedayn reported from Denver. Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report. Bedayn is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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  • Trump sues January 6 committee seeking to block subpoena for his testimony and documents | CNN Politics

    Trump sues January 6 committee seeking to block subpoena for his testimony and documents | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump has sued the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, as a way to challenge its subpoena for documents and his testimony, according to filings in a federal court in Florida.

    Trump is challenging both the legitimacy of the committee – which multiple courts have upheld – and is claiming he should be immune from testimony about the time he was president.

    Trump’s lawyers say they’ve communicated with the House over the past week and a half as the subpoena deadlines neared, offering to consider answering written questions while expressing “concerns and objections” about the bulk of the document requests.

    “The Subpoena’s request for testimony and documents from President Trump is an unwarranted intrusion upon the institution of the Presidency because there are other sources of the requested information, including the thousand-plus witnesses the Committee has contacted and one million documents that the Committee has collected,” his attorneys argue in the suit. “The Committee also may obtain abundant government records relevant to its inquiry. Because of this obvious availability to obtain testimony and documents from other readily available sources, the Subpoena is invalid.”

    A spokesperson for the January 6 committee declined to comment.

    Trump said the House’s demands, if he met them, would violate privilege protections around the executive branch, including revealing conversations he had with Justice Department officials and members of Congress about the 2020 election and “pending governmental business.”

    He also argued to the court that he shouldn’t have to reveal inner workings about his 2020 presidential campaign, “including his political beliefs, strategy, and fundraising. President Trump did not check his constitutional rights at the Oval Office door. Because the Committee’s Subpoena to President Trump infringes upon his First Amendment rights it is invalid.”

    Trump’s attorney, David Warrington, said in a statement in part that “long-held precedent and practice maintain that separation of powers prohibits Congress from compelling a President to testify before it.”

    The lawsuit veers the Trump subpoena fight toward a likely dead-end for the House select committee.

    Trump’s back-and-forth with the House followed by the lawsuit will make it much harder for the committee to enforce the subpoena – and the dispute essentially will be unresolvable before the current Congress expires in January.

    The lawsuit also raises some protections around the presidency that have never fully been tested by appeals courts, and Trump brought the lawsuit in a court that, unlike DC, hasn’t weighed in on his standoffs with House Democrats over the past several years.

    Trump provided to the court his team’s recent letters with the committee, which show that the House panel tried to zero in last week on obtaining records of his electronic communication on personal phones, via text or on other apps from January 6, 2021. The House also said it sought to identify every telephone and other communication device Trump used from Election Day until he left the presidency, according to the letters.

    In one letter on November 4, the original date of the document-turnover deadline, the House committee accused Trump’s team of trying to delay.

    “Given the timing and nature of your letter – without any acknowledgment that Mr. Trump will ultimately comply with the subpoena – your approach on his behalf appears to be a delay tactic,” wrote Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee.

    Since Trump’s team replied on November 9 that he wouldn’t testify and found no records to turn over related to personal communications, the House hasn’t respond substantively, the court papers said.

    But Trump’s legal team responded to the House this week that Trump “voluntarily directed a reasonable search for documents in his possession” that could fit those two categories. The search found nothing, his lawyers said.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • House January 6 committee gives Trump more time to turn over subpoenaed documents | CNN Politics

    House January 6 committee gives Trump more time to turn over subpoenaed documents | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, released a statement Friday outlining a new deadline for former President Donald Trump to turn over documents it subpoenaed.

    “We have informed the former President’s counsel that he must begin producing records no later than next week and he remains under subpoena for deposition testimony starting on November 14th,” the committee said in the statement.

    The panel subpoenaed Trump last month seeking a wide array of documents by 10 a.m. Friday and for Trump to sit for an interview under oath beginning on November 14 and “continuing on subsequent days as necessary.”

    The committee also said it “received correspondence from the former President and his counsel in connection with the Select Committee’s subpoena” but did not provide additional information.

    CNN has reached out to Trump and his attorneys for comment.

    Lawyers for Trump had accepted service of the subpoena from the committee as of October 26, according to sources familiar with the matter. Trump has criticized the committee but not said whether he would comply with the subpoena.

    On the day the subpoena was announced, Trump’s attorney David Warrington said in a statement the committee was “flouting norms and appropriate and customary process” by publicly releasing the subpoena and that his legal team would “respond as appropriate to this unprecedented action.”

    The Trump lawyers tapped to deal with the committee’s subpoena demands have been coordinating with other members of the former president’s legal team while determining how to proceed, according to a source familiar with the matter.

    Despite operating as two separate teams, the lawyers who are focused on addressing the committee’s subpoena are consulting with attorneys representing Trump in the Justice Department’s criminal probe related to January 6, the source said, noting there are areas of potential overlap between the two separate legal matters.

    Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice chairwoman of the committee, previously said the committee was “in discussions” with Trump’s attorneys about testifying under oath in the probe. But it remains unclear whether those discussions will lead to him sitting for a deposition.

    A letter from the committee that accompanied the subpoena summarized what the panel presented in a series of hearings to demonstrate why it believes Trump “personally orchestrated and oversaw” the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

    In the subpoena, the committee demanded Trump turn over any communications sent or received during from Election Day on November 3, 2020, to Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021, with more than a dozen of his close allies who have emerged as key players in the broader plan to overturn the 2020 election.

    It also asked Trump to turn over all records of phone calls, text messages or communications with any members of Congress from December 18, 2020, to January 6, 2021; all of his communications on January 6 specifically, and any communications or efforts to contact other witnesses in the committee’s investigation.

    The broad document request even asked for all documents and communications relating or referring “in any way” to members of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, or other extremist groups from September 1, 2020, to the present. The panel’s document request spans 19 different categories.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • January 6 committee announces it has sent a subpoena to former President Donald Trump | CNN Politics

    January 6 committee announces it has sent a subpoena to former President Donald Trump | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol announced on Friday that the panel has officially sent a subpoena to former President Donald Trump as it paints him as the central figure in the multi-step plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

    The committee issued the subpoena to try to compel Trump to sit for a deposition under oath and to provide documents. The panel is ordering Trump turn over documents by November 4 and “one or more days of deposition testimony beginning on or about November 14.” Unlike with previous subpoena announcements, the committee released the entire subpoena it sent to Trump along with the documents it is requesting.

    While it is not clear if Trump will comply with the subpoena, the action serves as a way for the committee to set down a marker and make clear they want information directly from Trump as the panel investigates the attack.

    “As demonstrated in our hearings, we have assembled overwhelming evidence, including from dozens of your former appointees and staff, that you personally orchestrated and oversaw a multi-part effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and to obstruct the peaceful transition of power,” the committee wrote in its letter.

    The panel summarizes what it presented in its hearings to demonstrate why it believes Trump “personally orchestrated and oversaw” the plan.

    Trump and his legal team have been discussing how to respond to the subpoena, a source familiar with the situation told CNN, stressing that no firm decisions had been made. Trump has tapped lawyers Harmeet Dhillon and Jim Trusty to take the lead on responding to the subpoena.

    The former president posted a lengthy response criticizing the committee on Truth Social after members voted unanimously to subpoena him but did not say whether he would comply. Trump also recently shared a Fox story on Truth Social that claimed he “loves the idea of testifying.” But Trump could also fight the subpoena in court, and such a legal challenge would likely outlast the committee’s mandate.

    In its subpoena, the committee specifically demands Trump turn over any communications, sent or received during the period of November 3, 2020, to January 20, 2021, with over a dozen of his close allies who have emerged as key players in the broader plan to overturn the 2020 election.

    The committee also notes that it wants Trump to testify about his interactions with several individuals, including people on the same list, who invoked their Fifth Amendment rights when questioned by the committee about their dealings with the former President.

    The House committee latest public hearing, where members voted to subpoena him, served as a closing argument to the American public ahead of the midterm election that Trump is at the center of the multifaceted plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

    “It is our obligation to seek Donald Trump’s testimony,” the panel’s chairman, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said ahead of the subpoena vote during the hearing.

    Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice chairwoman of the committee, said during the hearing that seeking Trump’s testimony under oath remains “a key task” because several witnesses closest to the former President invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to their interactions with Trump.

    “We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion” Cheney said, referring to Trump.

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  • Jan. 6 panel subpoenas Trump, shows startling new video

    Jan. 6 panel subpoenas Trump, shows startling new video

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee voted unanimously Thursday to subpoena former President Donald Trump, demanding his personal testimony as it unveiled startling new video and described his multi-part plan to overturn his 2020 election loss, which led to his supporters’ fierce assault on the U.S. Capitol.

    With alarming messages from the U.S. Secret Service warning of violence and vivid new video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders pleading for help, the panel showed the raw desperation at the Capitol. Using language frequently seen in criminal indictments, the panel said Trump had acted in a “premeditated” way ahead of Jan. 6, 2021, despite countless aides and officials telling him he had lost.

    Trump is almost certain to fight the subpoena and decline to testify. On his social media outlet he blasted members for not asking him earlier — though he didn’t say he would have complied — and called the panel “a total BUST.”

    “We must seek the testimony under oath of January 6′s central player,” said Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the committee’s vice chair, ahead of the vote.

    In the committee’s 10th public session, just weeks before the congressional midterm elections, the panel summed up Trump’s “staggering betrayal” of his oath of office, as Chairman Bennie Thompson put it, describing the then-president’s unprecedented attempt to stop Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.

    While the effort to subpoena Trump may languish, more a nod to history than an effective summons, the committee has made clear it is considering whether to send its findings in a criminal referral to the Justice Department.

    In one of its most riveting exhibits, the panel showed previously unseen footage of congressional leaders phoning for help during the assault as Trump refused to call off the mob.

    Pelosi can be seen on a call with the governor of neighboring Virginia, explaining as she shelters with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and others that the governor of Maryland has also been contacted. Later, the video shows Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders as the group asks the Defense Department for help.

    “They’re breaking the law in many different ways,” Pelosi says at one point. “And quite frankly, much of it at the instigation of the president of the United States.”

    The footage also portrays Vice President Mike Pence — not Trump — stepping in to help calm the violence, telling Pelosi and the others he has spoken with Capitol Police, as Congress plans to resume its session that night to certify Biden’s election.

    The video was from Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra, a documentary filmmaker.

    In never-before-seen Secret Service messages, the panel produced evidence that extremist groups provided the muscle in the fight for Trump’s presidency, planning weeks before the attack to send a violent force to Washington.

    The Secret Service warned in a Dec. 26, 2020, email of a tip that members of the right-wing Proud Boys planned to outnumber the police in a march in Washington on Jan. 6.

    “It felt like the calm before the storm,” one Secret Service agent wrote in a group chat.

    To describe the president’s mindset, the committee presented new and previously seen material, including interviews with Trump’s top aides and Cabinet officials — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General William Barr and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia — in which some described the president acknowledging he had lost.

    Ex-White House official Alyssa Farah Griffin said Trump once looked up at a television and said, “Can you believe I lost to this (expletive) guy?”

    Cabinet members also said in interviews shown at the hearing that they believed that once legal avenues had been exhausted, that should have been the end of Trump’s efforts to remain in power.

    “In my view, that was the end of the matter,” Barr said of the Dec. 14 vote of the Electoral College.

    But rather than the end of Trump’s efforts, it was only the beginning — as the president summoned the crowd to Washington on Jan. 6.

    The panel showed clips of Trump at his rally near the White House that day saying the opposite of what he had been told. He then tells supporters he will march with them to the Capitol. That never happened.

    “There is no defense that Donald Trump was duped or irrational,” said Cheney. “No president can defy the rule of law and act this way in our constitutional republic, period.”

    Thursday’s hearing opened at a mostly empty Capitol complex, with most lawmakers at home campaigning. Several people who were among the thousands around the Capitol on Jan. 6 are now running for congressional office, some with Trump’s backing. Police officers who fought the mob filled the hearing room’s front row.

    The House panel said the insurrection at the Capitol was not an isolated incident but a warning of the fragility of the nation’s democracy in the post-Trump era.

    “None of this is normal,” Cheney said.

    Along with interviews, the committee is drawing on the trove of 1.5 million pages of documents it received from the Secret Service, including an email from Dec. 11, 2020, the day the Supreme Court rejected one of the main lawsuits Trump’s team had brought against the election results.

    “Just fyi. POTUS is pissed,” the Secret Service message said.

    White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, recalled Trump being “fired up” about the court’s ruling.

    Trump told Meadows “something to the effect of: ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out,’” Hutchinson told the panel in a recorded interview.

    Thursday’s session served as a closing argument for the panel’s two Republican lawmakers, Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who have essentially been shunned by Trump and their party and will not be returning in the new Congress. Cheney lost her primary election, and Kinzinger decided not to run.

    The committee, having conducted more than 1,000 interviews and obtained countless documents, has produced a sweeping probe of Trump’s activities from his defeat in the November election to the Capitol attack.

    Under committee rules, the Jan. 6 panel is to produce a report of its findings, likely in December. The committee will dissolve 30 days after publication of that report, and with the new Congress in January.

    At least five people died in the Jan. 6 attack and its aftermath, including a Trump supporter shot and killed by Capitol Police.

    More than 850 people have been charged by the Justice Department, some receiving lengthy prison sentences for their roles. Several leaders and associates of the extremist Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have been charged with sedition.

    Trump faces various state and federal investigations over his actions in the election and its aftermath.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Jill Colvin, Kevin Freking and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

    More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump

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  • Prosecutors argue Graham should have to testify before grand jury in Georgia 2020 investigation | CNN Politics

    Prosecutors argue Graham should have to testify before grand jury in Georgia 2020 investigation | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Fulton County district attorney’s office is pushing back on Sen. Lindsey Graham’s ongoing efforts to quash a grand jury subpoena, saying his testimony is “essential” and could reveal more information about efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.

    Graham, a South Carolina Republican, is asking the 11th Circuit US Court of Appeals to put on hold a lower federal court order that Graham must testify to the grand jury, with the questions limited in scope.

    The litigation over the subpoena has been on-going for months, with Graham initially moving to quash the motion in July. Prosecutors say that, after three failed attempts to quash his subpoena, Graham is repeating the same arguments. They are asking for the matter to be remanded back to a Fulton County Superior Court, which oversees the grand jury investigation.

    “The Senator’s position, which would allow him to dictate when and where he will be immune from questioning or liability, renders him precisely the sort of unaccountable ‘super-citizen’ which the United States Supreme Court has taken care to avoid,” the Fulton County district attorney’s office said in the court filing with the 11th Circuit on Friday.

    Graham’s attorneys argue that the lower court ruling did not offer enough protection from being questioned about his role as a US senator.

    They say that his calls to Georgia officials after the election were legislative activity directly related to his committee responsibilities as the then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and that his actions should be protected by the US Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause.

    Atlanta-based federal Judge Leigh Martin May, who denied Graham’s motion to quash his subpoena this summer, wrote in her decision that there were “considerable areas of inquiry” that were not legislative in nature that he should have to testify about.

    Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the investigation into 2020 election interference, wrote in previous court filings that she wants to question the senator about his phone calls to election officials.

    Willis is particularly interested in a call Graham made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when – according to Raffensperger – Graham hinted that Raffensperger should discard some Georgia ballots during the state’s audit.

    Fulton County prosecutors on Friday said Graham’s claim that the call was intended to inform his vote on certifying the 2020 election amounts to “litigation-prompted hindsight” and “a product of lawyering, not legislating.”

    Graham has repeatedly denied accusations of applying any pressure to Georgia officials. Even if he were to lose this appeal, he signaled he would take the case to the Supreme Court.

    “I’ll go as far as I need to take it,” Graham told CNN last month. “I’m committed to standing up for the institution as I see it.”

    The 11th Circuit will rule on Graham’s emergency motion. The appeals court has set Tuesday as deadline for his legal team to file an opening brief on the merits of the appeal.

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  • FTC says Bezos, Jassy must testify in probe of Amazon Prime

    FTC says Bezos, Jassy must testify in probe of Amazon Prime

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators are ordering Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy to testify in the government’s investigation of Amazon Prime, rejecting the company’s complaint that the executives are being unfairly harassed in the probe of the popular streaming and shopping service.

    The Federal Trade Commission issued an order late Wednesday denying Amazon’s request to cancel civil subpoenas sent in June to Bezos, the Seattle-based company’s former CEO, and Jassy. The order also sets a deadline of Jan. 20 for the completion of all testimony by Bezos, Jassy and 15 other senior executives, who also were subpoenaed.

    Jassy took over the helm of the online retail and tech giant from Bezos, one of the world’s richest individuals, in July 2021. Bezos became executive chairman.

    Amazon hasn’t made the case that the subpoenas “present undue burdens in terms of scope or timing,” FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson said in the order on behalf of the agency. However, the FTC did agreed to modify some provisions of the subpoenas that it acknowledged appeared too broad.

    The FTC has been investigating since March 2021 the sign-up and cancellation practices of Amazon Prime, which has an estimated 200 million members around the globe.

    The company said it was disappointed but not surprised that the FTC mostly ruled in favor of its own position, but it was pleased that the agency “walked backed its broadest requests” in the subpoenas.

    “Amazon has cooperated with the FTC throughout the investigation and already produced tens of thousands of pages of documents,” the company said in a statement. “We are committed to engaging constructively with FTC staff, but we remain concerned that the latest requests are overly broad and needlessly burdensome, and we will explore all our options.”

    In a petition to the FTC filed last month, the company objected to the subpoenas to Bezos and Jassy, saying the agency “has identified no legitimate reason for needing their testimony when it can obtain the same information, and more, from other witnesses and documents.” Amazon said the FTC was hounding Bezos, Jassy and the other executives, calling the information demanded in the subpoenas “overly broad and burdensome.”

    The investigation has widened to include at least four other Amazon-owned subscription programs: Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle Unlimited and Subscribe & Save, as well as an unidentified third-party program not offered by Amazon. The regulators have asked the company to identify the number of consumers who were enrolled in the programs without giving their consent, among other customer information.

    With an estimated 150 million U.S. subscribers, Amazon Prime is a key source of revenue, as well as a wealth of customer data, for the company, which runs an e-commerce empire and ventures in cloud computing, personal “smart” tech and beyond. Amazon Prime costs $139 a year. The service added a coveted feature this year by obtaining exclusive video rights to the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football.”

    Last year, Amazon asked unsuccessfully that FTC Chair Lina Khan step aside from separate antitrust investigations into its business, contending that her public criticism of the company’s market power before she joined the government makes it impossible for her to be impartial. Khan was a fierce critic of tech giants Facebook (now Meta), Google and Apple, as well as Amazon. She arrived on the antitrust scene in 2017, writing an influential study titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” when she was a Yale law student.

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  • Trump lawyers rail against DOJ in letter, reveal foreign leader briefings may be among classified documents taken from White House | CNN Politics

    Trump lawyers rail against DOJ in letter, reveal foreign leader briefings may be among classified documents taken from White House | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Two of Donald Trump’s defense lawyers now believe that classified briefings of phone calls with foreign leaders were among “all manner of documents” in 15 boxes that Trump returned to the National Archives a year after he left the presidency, according to a new letter his lawyers sent to Congress.

    This organization of the materials “indicates that the White House staff simply swept all documents from the President’s desk and other areas into boxes, where they have resided ever since,” the two lawyers, Timothy Parlatore and Jim Trusty, wrote to the GOP chair of the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

    Their characterization not only reveals new details about the documents but also comes as part of a broadside against the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump over the classified documents that lays out talking points for Republicans as they try to portray the ongoing probe as politically motivated.

    The lawyers urge Congress to tell the Justice Department to “stand down,” even as special counsel Jack Smith’s probe has shown signs of nearing its end and even though Congress doesn’t have the power to control DOJ criminal investigations.

    Parlatore and Trusty say they reviewed the 15 boxes earlier this year that are now part of the Justice Department’s investigation. They saw placeholder pages where classified documents were removed by the National Archives, according to the letter.

    “The vast majority of the placeholder inserts refer to briefings for phone calls with foreign leaders that were located near the schedule for those calls,” the lawyers wrote.

    The 15 boxes were turned over to the Archives in January 2022. The FBI seized more boxes in August 2022 during a court-authorized search that found more than 100 classified documents, including 18 at the highest “top secret” classification level. Trump’s own legal team later found more classified materials in a search other locations.

    The Justice Department has never said exactly what was in the classified material found in Trump’s possession after the presidency. Trump’s lawyers say in their letter that the Justice Department has refused to tell them whether any of the documents remain classified.

    It’s not clear why at this point in the special counsel’s investigation that the Trump legal team was given access to the boxes turned over to the National Archives to look through them.

    Wednesday’s letter was sent to House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner, and it represents Trump’s legal team seeking a political lifeline by asking Congress tell the Justice Department to step aside because they believe the intelligence community should conduct the investigation into what happened with the classified documents.

    “DOJ should be ordered to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this Committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate,” the lawyers wrote to Turner.

    “This is indicative of the staff’s packing processes and not any criminal intent by President Trump,” the lawyers argued.

    The lawyers also pointed to classified documents since discovered at the residences and offices of President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence.

    “As demonstrated by the discovery of documents with classification markings in the homes of President Trump, President Biden, and Vice President Pence, deficient document handling and storage procedures are not limited to any individual, administration, or political party,” the lawyers wrote.

    The intelligence community said in August following the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that it was conducting its own damage assessment of the classified documents that had been retrieved.

    Earlier this month, intelligence leaders in Congress were provided access to some of the classified documents that had been taken from the residences and offices of Trump, Biden and Pence so that Congress could do its own review.

    Trump’s legal team sent Wednesday’s letter to Turner and copied other intelligence leaders in Congress, including the Democratic-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee. Trump’s allies have for years assailed the various probes into the former president, yet even his former attorney general, William Barr, has said the classified documents investigation puts the former president in serious legal jeopardy.

    In a February interview with CNN, Parlatore signaled Trump’s legal strategy, saying that DOJ should be “benched” on matters related to classified material and it should be left up to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to conduct an administrative review of the White House’s procedure for handling such documents at the end of each presidency.

    In Wednesday’s letter, Trump’s lawyers criticized the Justice Department’s handling of the case before the search of Mar-a-Lago, arguing that federal investigators put Trump on the defensive by issuing a grand jury subpoena instead of working cooperatively with Trump.

    The letter also tried to defend a certification made by one of Trump’s attorneys last year following the subpoena. In June 2022, the lawyer, Christina Bobb, signed a certification that Trump had complied with the subpoena by turning over the classified documents in his possession.

    “Ultimately, President Trump’s legal team complied with DOJ’s demands, performing as diligent a search as they could by Mr. (Jay) Bratt’s arbitrary deadline, and submitted a certification that affirmed the same,” the lawyers wrote in Wednesday’s letter.

    “To be clear, the certification stated that a diligent search was conducted, and all responsive documents found were provided — not that the search turned up all possible materials, as many media outlets have falsely characterized the certification as saying,” they added.

    The certification that Bobb signed, however, states that “any and all responsive documents accompany this certification.” Trump did not, however, turn over all classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

    Bobb has since testified to the grand jury, and another attorney who worked on the draft response to the subpoena, Evan Corcoran, was recently forced to testify to the federal grand jury about the response and other discussions with Trump, after prosecutors believed Trump used his attorney to advance a crime.

    Wednesday’s letter also did not note that the FBI’s August 2022 search warrant came after federal investigators were told that Trump directed the movement of boxes from a basement storage room to his residence at Mar-a-Lago following receipt of the subpoena.

    This story has been updated to reflect additional lawmakers copied on the letter from Trump’s lawyers.

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  • Oversight chairman halts plan to advance Wray contempt proceedings following deal over FBI document | CNN Politics

    Oversight chairman halts plan to advance Wray contempt proceedings following deal over FBI document | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Oversight Chairman James Comer is scrapping his plans to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress after the two sides reached an agreement over an FBI document that includes an unverified allegation that Joe Biden, while vice president, was involved in a bribery scheme involving a foreign national.

    Comer, a Kentucky Republican, accepted the FBI’s offer to allow all members on the House Oversight panel to view the internal law enforcement document he initially subpoenaed, known as an FD-1023, in exchange for halting contempt proceedings. The FBI will also make two additional documents available to Comer and the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin, according to Comer’s statement announcing the agreement. As a result of the deal, Comer removed Thursday’s scheduled committee meeting to refer Wray for contempt from the schedule.

    “Allowing all Oversight Committee members to review this record is an important step toward conducting oversight of the FBI and holding it accountable to the American people,” Comer said in a statement.

    In response to the deal, Raskin said in a statement, “Chairman Comer’s acceptance of these further accommodations comes after he has spent weeks attacking the FBI despite its extraordinary efforts to provide Committee Republicans the information they claim to seek.”

    CNN first reported the FBI’s offer earlier Wednesday.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had said earlier in the day that Comer and Wray were planning to speak Wednesday night to negotiate, and signaled that he would accept the FBI’s offer and cease contempt efforts if all committee members could view the document in question.

    “He needs to show it to every Republican and every Democrat on the committee. If he is willing to do that, then there’s not a need to have contempt. But if he doesn’t follow through with that, then there would be a need for contempt,” McCarthy said of Wray.

    Earlier this week, senior FBI officials briefed Comer and Raskin. Previously, Comer had said he wanted the FBI to actually turn the document over to him.

    While the FBI had previously declined to hand over a hard copy of the document, noting it contains unverified information from a confidential human source, the bureau said it was willing to hold a briefing with members of the panel and allow them to view the document as early as Wednesday, sources told CNN, in an effort to stave off contempt of Congress proceedings.

    The alleged bribery claims documented in the 1023 form surfaced years ago under the Trump administration and eventually became part of Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ investigation of Hunter Biden, which remains ongoing, people briefed on the matter said. The 1023 includes allegations related to Hunter Biden, as well as Joe Biden, according to people familiar with matter.

    The FBI interviewed the informant, who was known to the bureau and had considered him a trusted source based on interactions in a previous investigation. Investigators were unable to corroborate the claims, but Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady, who then-Attorney General William Barr had appointed to review allegations brought to the Justice Department by Rudy Giuliani, decided to send the informant’s allegations to Weiss, who was already leading the Hunter Biden probe.

    It’s unclear what additional steps the FBI took to investigate the claims, but Weiss’ investigation of Hunter Biden has since narrowed in scope to focus on alleged tax violations and a possible false statement.

    The White House has denied the allegation and dismissed the GOP probe as a political stunt.

    The decision to halt contempt proceedings comes as a number of House Republicans have been pushing to hold Wray in contempt.

    GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a member of the Oversight Committee, told CNN she plans to vote in favor of contempt.

    “I voted to hold people in contempt up here before. If you don’t follow through with the subpoena, there are consequences to it,” she said. “They’ve stonewalled, they’ve obfuscated, they’ve bullshitted, you know what I mean? It’s like, just follow the law.”

    GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, also a member of the Oversight panel, told CNN, “It’s an unclassified form. Just showing it to our chairman and to the ranking member, Congressman Raskin, that’s not enough. We subpoenaed the form. And so, the form needs to be handed over. This is his job – Chris Wray’s job.”

    “If the director of the FBI is flouting subpoenas from Congress, I’m fully supportive of every effort to enforce the subpoena,” GOP Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina, who serves on the House Judiciary Committee told CNN.

    This story and headline have been updated to reflect additional developments.

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  • Timeline: The special counsel inquiry into Trump’s handling of classified documents | CNN Politics

    Timeline: The special counsel inquiry into Trump’s handling of classified documents | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The federal criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s potential mishandling of classified documents escalated in stunning fashion this week with Trump’s indictment.

    The indictment hasn’t been unsealed yet, so details of the charges aren’t publicly available. But the investigation – led by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith – revolves around sensitive government papers that Trump held onto after his White House term ended in January 2021. The special counsel has also examined whether Trump or his aides obstructed the investigation.

    Federal authorities have recovered more than 325 classified documents from Trump. He has voluntarily given back some materials, his lawyers turned over additional files after a subpoena, and the FBI found dozens of classified records during a court-approved search of his Mar-a-Lago home last summer.

    Trump has denied all wrongdoing and claims the investigation is a politically motivated sham, intended to derail his ongoing campaign to win the Republican 2024 nomination and return to the White House.

    Here’s a timeline of the important developments in the blockbuster investigation.

    An official from the National Archives and Records Administration contacts Trump’s team after realizing that several important documents weren’t handed over before Trump left the White House. In hopes of locating the missing items, NARA lawyer Gary Stern reaches out to someone who served in the White House counsel’s office under Trump, who was the point of contact for recordkeeping matters. The missing documents include some of Trump’s correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, as well as the map of Hurricane Dorian that Trump infamously altered with a sharpie pen.

    In a taped conversation, Trump acknowledges that he still has a classified Pentagon document about a possible attack against Iran, according to CNN reporting. The recording, which was made at Trump’s golf club in New Jersey, indicates that Trump understood that he retained classified material after leaving the White House. The special counsel later obtained this audiotape, a key piece of evidence in his inquiry.

    NARA grows frustrated with the slow pace of document turnover after several months of conversations with the Trump team. Stern reaches out to another Trump attorney to intervene. The archivist asks about several boxes of records that were apparently taken to Mar-a-Lago during Trump’s relocation to Florida. NARA still doesn’t receive the White House documents they are searching for.

    After months of discussions with Trump’s team, NARA retrieves 15 boxes of Trump White House records from Mar-a-Lago. The boxes contained some materials that were part of “special access programs,” known as SAP, which is a classification that includes protocols to significantly limit who would have access to the information. NARA says in a statement that some of the records it received at the end of Trump’s administration were “torn up by former President Trump,” and that White House officials had to tape them back together. Not all the torn-up documents were reconstructed, NARA says.

    NARA asks the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s handling of White House records and whether he violated the Presidential Records Act and other laws related to classified information. The Presidential Records Act requires all records created by a sitting president to be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administration.

    NARA informs the Justice Department that some of the documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago included classified material. NARA also tells the department that, despite being warned it was illegal, Trump occasionally tore up government documents while he was president.

    On April 7, NARA publicly acknowledges for the first time that the Justice Department is involved, and news outlets report that prosecutors have launched a criminal probe into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents. Around this time, FBI agents quietly interview Trump aides at Mar-a-Lago about the handling of presidential records as part of their widening investigation.

    The FBI asks NARA for access to the 15 boxes it retrieved from Mar-a-Lago in January. The request was formally transmitted to NARA by President Joe Biden’s White House Counsel’s office, because the incumbent president controls presidential documents in NARA custody.

    The Justice Department sends a letter to Trump’s lawyers as part of its effort to access the 15 boxes, notifying them that more than 100 classified documents, totaling more than 700 pages, were found in the boxes. The letter says the FBI and US intelligence agencies need “immediate access” to these materials because of “important national security interests.” Also on this day, Trump lawyers ask NARA to delay its plans to give the FBI access to these materials. Trump’s lawyers say they want time to examine the materials to see if anything is privileged, and that they are making a “protective assertion of executive privilege” over all the documents.

    Trump’s lawyers write again to NARA, and ask again that NARA postpone its plans to give the FBI access to the materials retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.

    Debra Steidel Wall, the acting archivist of the United States, who runs NARA, informs Trump’s lawyers that she is rejecting their claims of “protective” executive privilege over all the materials taken from Mar-a-Lago and will therefore turn over the materials to the FBI and US intelligence agencies, in a four-page letter.

    The Justice Department subpoenas Trump, demanding all documents with classification markings that are still at Mar-a-Lago. At some point after receiving the subpoena, Trump asks his lawyer Evan Corcoran if there was any way to fight the subpoena, but Corcoran tells him he has to comply, according to notes Cochran took and later gave to investigators. Also after getting the subpoena, Trump aides are captured on surveillance footage moving document boxes into and out of a basement storage room – which has become a major element of the obstruction investigation.

    News outlets report that investigators subpoenaed NARA for access to the classified documents they retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. The subpoena is the first public indication of the Justice Department using a grand jury in its investigation.

    As part of the effort to comply with the subpoena, Corcoran searches a Mar-a-Lago storage room and finds 38 classified documents. According to a lawsuit that the former president later filed, Trump invites FBI officials to come to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the subpoenaed materials.

    Federal investigators, including a top Justice Department counterintelligence official, visit Mar-a-Lago to deal with the subpoena for remaining classified documents. The investigators meet with Trump’s attorneys, including Corcoran, and look around the basement storage room where the documents were stored. Trump briefly stops by the meeting to say hello to the officials, but he does not answer any questions. Corcoran hands over the 38 classified documents that he found. Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signs a sworn affidavit inaccurately asserting that there aren’t any more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

    Trump’s attorneys receive a letter from federal investigators, asking them to further secure the room where documents are being stored. In response, Trump aides add a padlock to the room in the basement of Mar-a-Lago.

    Federal investigators serve a subpoena to the Trump Organization, demanding surveillance video from Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s company complies with the subpoena and turns over the footage. CNN has reported that this was part of an effort to gather information about who had access to areas at the club where government documents were stored.

    The FBI executes a court-approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago – a major escalation of the investigation. The search focused on the area of the club where Trump’s offices and personal quarters are located. Federal agents found more than 100 additional classified documents at the property. The search was the first time in American history that a former president’s home was searched as part of a criminal investigation.

    Trump sends a message through one his lawyers to Attorney General Merrick Garland, saying he has “been hearing from people all over the country about the raid” who are “angry,” and that “whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know,” according to a lawsuit he later filed. Hours later, after three days of silence, Garland makes a brief public statement about the investigation. He reveals that he personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant, and that the Justice Department will continue to apply the law “without fear or favor.” Garland also pushes back against what he called “unfounded attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department.”

    Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart approves the unsealing of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant and its property receipt, at the Justice Department’s request and after Trump’s lawyers agree to the release. The warrant reveals the Justice Department is looking into possible violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records, as part of its investigation.

    Trump files a federal lawsuit seeking the appointment of a third-party attorney known as a “special master” to independently review the materials that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago. In the lawsuit, Trump’s lawyers argue that the Justice Department can’t be trusted to do its own review for potentially privileged materials that should be siloed off from the criminal probe.

    In a major ruling in Trump’s favor, Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, grants Trump’s request for a special master to review the seized materials from Mar-a-Lago. She says the special master will have the power to look for documents covered under attorney-client privilege and executive privilege.

    The Justice Department appeals Cannon’s decision in the special master case.

    Cannon appoints senior Judge Raymond Dearie to serve as the special master and sets a November 30 deadline for the Brooklyn-based federal judge to finish his review of the seized materials.

    A maintenance worker drains the swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago, which ends up flooding a room where there are computer severs that contain surveillance video logs, according to CNN reporting. It’s unclear if the flood was accidental or on purpose, and it’s possible that the IT equipment wasn’t damaged, but federal prosecutors found the incident to be suspicious.

    Former Trump administration official Kash Patel testifies before the federal grand jury in the classified documents investigation. A Trump loyalist, Patel had publicly claimed that Trump declassified all the materials that ended up at Mar-a-Lago, even though there is no evidence to back up those assertions.

    Garland announces that he is appointing special counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigation.

    A federal appeals court shuts down the special master review of the documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago. The appeals panel rebuked Cannon’s earlier decisions, writing that she essentially tried to “interfere” with the criminal probe and had created a “special exception” in the law to help Trump.

    Trump attorney Timothy Parlatore testifies before the special counsel’s grand jury, where he described how Trump’s lawyers scoured his properties for classified materials. He later left Trump’s legal team.

    Trump’s legal team searches four of his properties in Florida, New York and New Jersey for additional classified material. They find two more classified files in a Florida storage unit, and give them to the FBI. Around this time, Trump’s team also finds additional papers with classification markings at Mar-a-Lago, and they give those materials to the Justice Department. They also turn over a laptop belonging to a Trump aide who had copied those documents onto the computer, not realizing they were classified.

    A string of key witnesses testify before the special counsel’s grand jury in Washington, DC. This includes Trump administration officials Robert O’Brien and Ric Grenell, who handled national security and intelligence matters; Margo Martin, a communications aide who continued working for Trump after he left the White House; and Matthew Calamari Sr. and his son, Matthew Calamari Jr., longtime Trump employees who oversee security for the Trump Organization.

    In response to a new subpoena from the special counsel, Trump’s lawyers turn over some material related to a classified Pentagon document that he discussed at a recorded meeting in 2021. However, Trump’s team wasn’t able to find the specific document – about a potential US attack on Iran – that prosecutors were looking for.

    Corcoran, the lead Trump attorney, testifies before the grand jury in Washington, DC. This occurred after a federal judge ordered him to answer prosecutors’ questions, ruling that attorney-client privilege did not shield his discussion with Trump because Trump might been trying to commit a crime through his attorneys. Corcoran later recused himself from handling the Mar-a-Lago matter.

    The first public indications emerge that the special counsel is using a second grand jury in Miami to gather evidence. Multiple witnesses testify in front of the Miami-based panel, CNN reported.

    Trump lawyers meet with senior Justice Department officials – including special counsel Smith – to discuss the Mar-a-Lago investigation. The sitdown lasted about 90 minutes, and Trump’s team raised concerns about the probe, which they have called an “unlawful” and “outrageous” abuse of the legal system.

    News outlets report that the Justice Department recently sent a “target letter” to Trump, formally notifying him that he’s a target of the investigation into potential mishandling of classified documents.

    News outlets report that Trump has been indicted in connection with the classified documents investigation. Trump also says in a social media post that the Justice Department informed his attorneys that he was indicted – and called the case a “hoax.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Takeaways from the indictment of Donald Trump in the classified documents case | CNN Politics

    Takeaways from the indictment of Donald Trump in the classified documents case | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Special counsel Jack Smith returned an historic indictment against former President Donald Trump that was unsealed Friday, the first time that a former president has been charged with crimes in federal court.

    Trump faces a total of 37 counts, including 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information. His aide, Walt Nauta, faces six counts, including several obstruction and concealment-related charges stemming from the alleged conduct.

    “We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone applying those laws, collecting facts, that’s what determines the outcome of an investigation,” Smith said in a short appearance in Washington, DC, on Friday. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

    The 49-page indictment included new details about how Trump allegedly took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office in 2021 and resisted the government’s attempts to retrieve the classified materials. In his statement, Smith encouraged the public to read it “in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.”

    Here are the key takeaways from the indictment:

    Trump and Nauta face nearly a half-dozen charges relating to obstruction and concealment of documents in the Justice Department’s probe, which will help prosecutors make the argument that Trump’s alleged conduct went well beyond the classified document snafus involving President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence.

    The indictment lays out how Nauta allegedly moved the boxes out of the storage room where a Trump attorney was set to search for classified materials in a response to a May 2022 subpoena, and how the aide only moved some of those boxes back before the attorney’s search. Prosecutors, pointing to phone calls and other evidence, allege that Nauta moved these boxes at Trump’s direction.

    To bolster the narrative that Trump knew he was concealing materials that were being sought in a grand jury subpoena, the indictment points to a conversation Trump had with his attorneys about how to respond to the subpoena, in which Trump allegedly suggested that his team could not turn over the classified documents the subpoena demanded.

    “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump is alleged to have said.

    After his attorney collected 38 records that would be turned over to the DOJ, the attorney discussed with Trump storing them in his hotel room. Trump, during the back and forth, made a “plucking motion,” the indictment said, which the attorney memorialized as meaning: “why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”

    Trump is accused of showing classified documents on two occasions to others.

    The episodes described in the indictment suggest Trump knew the information was classified and highly sensitive and may help prosecutors explain to a jury why Trump’s alleged willful retention of national defense information is such a serious crime.

    One of those occasions that Trump allegedly showed others classified records he took from the White House was a 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, when Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack’ that Trump said was prepared by the Defense Department,” a meeting CNN first reported was captured on an audio recording.

    “Trump also said ‘as president I could have declassified it,’ and ‘Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,’” according to the indictment.

    According to prosecutors, in August or September 2021 Trump also showed a document at Bedminster to a representative of his political action committee: a classified map related to a military operation and “told the representative that he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close.’”

    The indictment says Trump retained documents related to national defense that were classified at the highest levels and some so sensitive they required special handling.

    That includes one Top Secret document, dated June 2020, “concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign county” found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to the indictment.

    This document was not only classified as “Top Secret” but included additional restrictions of “ORCON” and “NOFORN.”

    Documents designated as ORCON cannot be disseminated outside of the department issuing it without approval. Those labeled NOFORN cannot be shared with foreign nationals.

    For the prosecution, the Justice Department has singled out 31 documents in particular for each of the 31 willful retention counts. Several of the records concern the military capabilities of various countries, with one of the records – marked as NOFORN – also including handwritten annotation in a black marker.

    The materials include White House intelligence briefings “related to various foreign countries.” One record relates to the “timeline and details of attack in a foreign country,” while another December 2019 document concerns “foreign country support of terrorist acts against the United States interests.”

    Nationally security law experts previously told CNN that when prosecutors are investigating a classified materials case, they look for so-called “Goldilocks documents” that are sensitive enough to drive home the seriousness of the crime but not so sensitive that they cannot be used in a trial.

    In addition to the timeline in the charging papers – sometimes broken down by the minute explaining how boxes with classified information moved around Trump’s Florida resort after Trump allegedly brought them there from the White House – the indictment includes six pictures that allowed prosecutors to vividly make their case that classified documents had been moved all over Mar-a-Lago.

    The photos show boxes in a ballroom, a basement storage room – even in a bathroom and shower inside the Mar-a-Lago club’s Lake Room, according to the indictment.

    In one photo, there are boxes of spilled documents on the floor. The indictment states that Nauta found the contents of several boxes spilled on the floor of the storage room in December 2021, including a “Five Eyes” classified document, which means intelligence only shared among five countries: the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

    Nauta allegedly texted two photos of the spill to another Trump employee, prosecutors allege. The indictment includes that photo – illustrating how the classified documents Trump kept were interspersed with newspapers and photographs.

    With the 31 documents the indictment describes as underlying the 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, the indictment also lists when those documents were recovered by the government. Twenty-one were retrieved on August 8, 2022 – the date of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago – and 10 were retrieved on June 3, 2022, when Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran turned over classified documents in response to the Justice Department’s May 2022 subpoena.

    The indictment does not, however, list in the charges that any of the classified documents were turned over in January 2022, when Trump handed over 15 boxes to the National Archives. The Archives found nearly 200 classified documents in those boxes, according to the indictment, including 30 marked “top secret.”

    It’s notable that the indictment does not include any documents retrieved in January 2022, given that Trump and his allies in Congress have attacked the Justice Department for not charging Biden or others who had unauthorized classified documents in their possession.

    The difference of course, is that Biden – as well as former Pence – immediately contacted the National Archives and offered to return the documents, while prosecutors allege that Trump obstructed efforts to retrieve the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

    A separate special counsel investigation into Biden’s handling of documents remains ongoing, while the Justice Department told Pence’s attorney no charges would be brought over the discovery of classified documents in his Indiana home.

    Trump has been summoned to appear in court in southern Florida at 3 p.m. ET Tuesday, where he will appear before a magistrate judge to hear the charges against him and is expected to enter a not guilty plea.

    On Friday, Smith pledged that his office would “seek a speedy trial on this matter consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused.”

    Just how quickly the case goes to trial is still an open question, as the discovery process for this case could be lengthy. It will be further complicated by the fact that this prosecution involves classified materials.

    The Justice Department believes it will take prosecutors 21 business days – about a month – in court to present their case to a jury at trial, according to a document prosecutors filed with the court alongside the indictment. The estimate does not include how long the defense might take to present its case, which includes the possibility that Trump could chose to testify in his own defense.

    The case has been assigned to federal District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge who raised eyebrows last year when she oversaw court proceedings related to the Trump’s efforts to appoint a so-called special master to review the documents seized in the FBI’s August search of Mar-a-Lago. Her move to order the third-party review of the search was overturned by a conservative federal appeals court.

    Trump already has a trial scheduled for March 2024 in his New York criminal case, and additional investigations into the former president – including from the Fulton County district attorney and the special counsel’s separate January 6 probe – are still looming.

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