Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen said Saturday that he believes the former president thought about using classified documents to extort the United States government or give them over to North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
On Cohen’s YouTube podcast Mea Culpa, he spoke with former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner about the classified documents that were seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, over the summer.
“I believe he was going to use it for two things, one to extort the United States government in these indictments and potential incarcerations by stating, ‘I have documents that involve national security, and that are detrimental to the national security of the country,'” Cohen said.
He then continued, depicting what he thought the former president would say, “You keep coming at me like this, you keep coming at my family, we’re going to release these documents to Iran, to Saudi Arabia, to North Korea, to you know Americas adversaries.”
Cohen added that he believes Trump would have used the documents for financial gain “because he knows he is guilty of all these things.”
Meanwhile, political analyst and Dillard University professor Robert Collins, told Newsweek on Saturday, “There is no evidence at this time that he [Trump] planned to give those documents to anyone outside of the U.S. Trump simply took the position that those documents belonged to him.”
Collins added: “At the end of the day, the simplest explanation, is that Trump has a very large ego, and perhaps a narcissistic personality, and he really believes that anything he received at the White House during his term became his personal property.”
In August, FBI agents, with the approval of Attorney General Merrick Garland, searched Mar-a-Lago and seized top secret and other classified documents that the ex-president was holding onto. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in regard to the documents and said that anything he took when he left the White House last year had been already declassified. The documents belong to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
The former president called the raid “an unprecedented infringement of the rights of every American citizen.”
“Scam after Scam, year after year, it is all the Radical Left Democrats really know, it is their lifeblood – they have no shame. Our Country is paying a very big price!!!” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social the day after the raid.
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s office for comment.
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