As disgraced former president Donald Trump continues to press for the full and unredacted search warrant affidavit to be released by the Justice Department, there’s one piece of highly incriminating evidence the DOJ may make public, according to former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who was a member of Robert Mueller’s investigative team in the Russia probe.
Weissmann was a guest on MSNBC’s “The Beat” Friday, and was asked by host Ari Melber:
“What portion do you expect — for people to understand, because we’ve heard a lot of legal terms and redactions, there is more information coming — how much it is and how much of that is a win or loss is to be explained?”
Weissmann responded:
“So remember that the district court — the magistrate judge has seen the entire affidavit, so when the government was saying it’s all something that’s sensitive to a criminal investigation or it’s all something sensitive from a national security perspective or witnesses, he has in front of him the affidavit. So he can sort of see, are there portions that don’t implicate those concerns? So the thing that I think we will still not see is anything that could reveal the identity of witnesses. I don’t think we’re going to learn anything about the substance of classified information, those kinds of documents, so if we’re concerned, for instance, was there nuclear information? I don’t know that we’re going to see that, and I think leads, things about various things that the Department might still be doing, so things that they saw in the surveillance tapes if that’s in the affidavit, all of that could be fairly redacted.”
However, Weissmann added, there is one portion of the affidavit that would potentially be devastating for Trump and literally turn the tables on his claims of innocence:
“An area where I do think we could see something that would be very useful is the whole back-and-forth between the Department and Donald Trump and his people. That’s something that Donald Trump knows, those people can clearly put it out there and I could see the judge saying, you know what, I don’t really see how that implicates so much the concerns here from a national security perspective. Maybe some of the substance would be redacted, but that seems like it would give us a fair amount of detail on something, and more than we know now.”
Indeed, a record of the DOJ communicating with Trump, asking for return of the classified documents and his refusals to do so would prove the FBI had no choice but to use a search warrant to get ahold of those top secret papers. That alone would be clear evidence that Trump has been lying all along.
