Throughout the Mar-a-Lago saga, it has been a running joke: Donald Trump and his media propagandists kept insisting he had declassified the documents he hoarded, supposedly proving his innocence. Yet his lawyers kept refusing to fully embrace this view, suggesting that as a legal argument, it’s rather worthless.
Now Trump’s trickery has run aground in spectacularly revealing fashion: In a new filing, Trump’s lawyers effectively admit they don’t want to address whether he declassified documents, while seeming to acknowledge he could face indictment.
This episode reveals the perils of lawyering by Fox News: If you tailor arguments to a forum where damning facts are never admitted as evidence and Trump’s defenses never face real scrutiny, eventually you’ll hit a wall of legal reality.
This bizarre turn came after Trump and the Justice Department submitted filings to Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master conducting a review of documents that the department secured in the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, in response to Trump’s demands for that review.
In their filing, Trump’s lawyers responded to a plan Dearie suggested for this process. While that plan is not public, the Trump team’s objections provide a glimpse of it. As The Post reports:
Specifically, the legal team objected to what it said was Dearie’s request that it “disclose specific information regarding declassification to the Court and to the Government.”
Trump’s lawyers wrote that they don’t want Dearie to...
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