Special counsel quotes Trump from 2016 to the present
Washington: The federal indictment against Donald Trump is rooted in the contents of the classified documents he kept after leaving the White House, but charging papers show how the famously unfiltered former president’s own words helped prosecutors build a case against him.
In order to win at trial, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team will have to persuade a jury that Trump not only mishandled sensitive national security information and interfered with the government’s efforts to get the records back, but that he did so “willfully” and “knowingly.” It’s a high bar to clear, and one that requires tapping into a defendant’s state of mind.
The numerous Trump quotations in the 44-page indictment unsealed on Friday ” from his 2016 attacks on political rival Hillary Clinton to what prosecutors described as recorded comments in 2021 lamenting that he could no longer declassify a military “plan of attack” he still had “provide rhetorical flourish to the indictment, said former New York federal prosecutor Sarah Krissoff. They “show that he’s saying one thing and doing another,” she said.
