The Justice
Department's investigation
into former President Trump's
handling of documents
appears to be far from over.
Just this week,
the Trump
legal team
turned over
even more materials
with classified markings
along with a laptop.
They also handed over an empty folder
marked classified evening briefing.
And joining us now is one of former
President Trump's attorneys Tim Barletta.
All right.
Be to be clear,
the former
president has a lot of legal issues,
but you specifically represent him
in the special counsel's investigation.
Since January six, and Mar a Lago. Yes.
All right.
As you just heard, CNN
and other outlets
reporting that you handed over
additional materials, pages
with classified markings,
a laptop and a thumb
drive over to investigators.
Tim Trump has been out of office
for two years.
Why the classified materials
keep showing up.
You know, what has happened here
that you've seen here
and also in the Biden
and Pence investigations
is that
the White House
does not have proper procedures
for handling classified information.
And these documents,
when they get packed up and sent out,
when people leave office,
they do keep showing up, if you will.
We conducted a search back in December,
which is where we found these documents
and we turned them over immediately.
These were not turned over last week,
although the DOJ leaked it last week.
This was turned over back in December.
And so we have gone through
we've tried to work with the DOJ.
We've tried to do
searches of all the relevant places.
And anytime we found anything,
we've immediately turned it over.
And as we understand it, the laptop
that was handed over
it had scanned copies
of some of the pages
that were handed over.
We learned that this laptop
belonged to an aide
from the Save America pack.
So why would someone from a pack
have access to classified materials?
She was working as an aide to
to the president.
And this is a box
that had all of his daily schedules
from his time in office.
And she scanned all of those as part of,
you know,
being available
for future speeches or
biographies or things like that.
And after we did
the search in December,
and we found that
within this box of thousands,
that there were a couple of pages
that had a little marking at the bottom,
which we turned over.
After that,
we found that she had scanned the box.
So that would be digitized.
She had no idea that there was any
classification markings on anything.
And as soon as we found out about that,
we called up DOJ
to let them know
and immediately provided them
access to it.
Now, you also turned over an empty folder
marked classified to investigators.
Where was this folder
and why was it turned over?
The folder is kind of
one of the more humorous aspects
of this whole thing.
This is not a classified folder.
This is a folder
that when my team went through and search
and they were up there report,
which we turned over to DOJ,
they saw it's a it's a folder manila
folder that says Classified
evening summary on it.
And it was in the president's bedroom.
He has one of those landline telephones
next to his bed
and has a blue light on it,
and it keeps him up at night.
So he took the manila folder
and put it over it
so that it would keep the light down
so he could sleep at night.
And it's just this folder
it says classified evening brief
evening summary on
it is not a classification marking.
It's not anything that is controlled
in any way.
There's nothing illegal about it.
There's nothing in it.
And when DOJ found out about it,
they went crazy.
And they said they actually gave me
a subpoena to say,
give us over this empty folder.
That means nothing.
How did they find out
about a folder on his bed table?
We put it in our report.
We when we did all of our searches,
we wrote up reports on everywhere.
We searched everywhere.
We looked anything.
We found where we found it.
And we gave that to them
because everything that we've done
as part of that search has been
in the spirit
of full cooperation and compliance.
And when they read that and they saw,
oh, there's this folder here
that is
so far
outside of the scope of the subpoena
or anything else, they demanded it back.
And so now the president
has to find a different way
to keep the blue light out of his lies.
I'm sure he has other options,
but from wrong.
There's also a similar folder
on display at the Trump Tower Bar.
He is under criminal investigation
for potentially mishandling
classified materials.
And doesn't
the use of these folders suggests
somewhat of a flip in attitude
towards classified materials?
Not at all.
This is
these are folders
that he was given
during his time in office.
He didn't keep the contents of the folder
but the folder itself is interesting.
So he did keep a copy, you know,
some of the folders.
He put one on display at the 45 bar.
He put one on his phone
down in Mar a Lago.
When we went through the
the boxes at the National Archives,
we found a few more of them there.
Yeah,
this is, it's a, it's
essentially it's a piece of stationery.
It doesn't actually contain anything
controlled or anything.
Really? That's a problem.
Oh, he's obviously
running for president again.
You keep uncovering
these classified documents
outside of the settings
in which they belong.
What do you say to people
who believe that he shouldn't
be trusted with the nation's secrets?
Nothing that we
have found
has any implications on him personally.
Everything that we have found
has been consistent
with what
I've been saying from the beginning,
which is
the White House across administrations.
Their handling of classified documents
is not the same
as how
the intelligence agencies
handle it or the military handles it.
And so documents are not controlled
in the White House
across administrations.
When people leave the White House
and GSA packs everything up,
they get mixed in, as we've seen
with President Trump,
with President Biden,
with Vice President Pence.
And really, you know what?
I say here is President Trump.
This doesn't
have anything to do with him.
This has to do
with White House procedures,
which is one of the reasons why I say
DOJ should get out of this
and they should instead
do a review
of what the procedures
are in the White House
and then legislative change on how future
White House administrations
handle documents
that would solve the problem.
One big difference
between your client
and the other two folks
that you mentioned
is the fact that once
this issue was raised,
your client did not
automatically make an effort
to turn over everything.
It's taken a while.
Things are still being handed over.
And it's not just potentially
mishandling classified information.
Your client is also under investigation
for possible obstruction.
I would disagree with that
because you're investigating.
Not that,
but that he didn't try to cooperate
from the beginning.
He has tried to cooperate.
In fact,
he had a meeting with the
with the members of DOJ
where he said,
if there's anything else
you need, let us know.
DOJ has taken a position of,
you know, really
an adversarial position on this,
where as much as we want to cooperate
with them,
they would rather make this
into an adversarial fight
and try to make it into a criminal case.
Had they handled it
appropriately from the beginning,
agreed to work with us, work
towards making sure
that we just get the documents
and everything is
put back into its place.
This all would have been avoided.
A lot of what you have
here is an appearance of noncompliance,
which is created by DOJ in the manner
in which they have handled this.
Are you still searching
for documents classified?
We have good markings.
Not at this time, no.
We have we have completed our searches
We've given up our reports to DOJ.
They've seen everything.
This latest
leak from
this past week is really from stuff
that happened back in December.
And as the special counsel expressed.
Any interest in
speaking with your client?
Not to me if he did.
Jack Smith is interested
in asking your client questions.
Would you allow him to do that?
I would certainly consider it,
but I'd like to talk to Jack
Smith himself first.
We haven't talked to Jack Smith yet.
No, but I'd like them. Okay.
Former Vice President
Mike Pence, as you know,
was recently subpoenaed
in the January 6th investigation.
Do you expect to assert privilege
to block some of that testimony?
So as with any witness
that goes before the grand jury,
we have been instructing them
to preserve the privilege.
So any question that they're asked
that doesn't call for privileged answer,
they should answer any question
that they're asked
that calls for something
that is protected by privilege, either
executive attorney, client or otherwise.
They should assert that privilege
at that time.
You know,
they don't give us a list of questions
ahead of time.
They assert the privilege.
And then after they're done testifying,
then it's up to DOJ to decide
whether they want to file
a motion to compel or not.
And so really,
all we know
is they want to bring people in.
And if they're not
going to give us a list of questions
so that we can figure it out. Exactly.
We tell them,
okay, assert privilege to everything.
Because the reality is
you don't want to create a precedent
where DOJ can just
run roughshod over the privilege
because it's a new administration.
So we instruct them,
they assert,
and then DOJ decides
whether they want to file
a motion to compel.
So it sounds like you
you will likely assert privilege over
the Mike Pence testimony.
Every witness
that goes into the grand jury
that has information
that's potentially privileged,
we tell them to assert the privilege.
And that would also apply
to Robert O'Brien,
the former national security adviser.
Every witness that goes in
and then as you saw
this week, one additional
classified document was found
during a search of vice former Vice
President Mike Pence.
His house
Do you think a special counsel
should be appointed
to look into his case?
I don't
I don't think that there should be
special counsel's
appointed to look at any classified
document cases
I think that that is a business
that DOJ needs to be
put on the bench for.
And instead, the office of the Director
of National Intelligence
should get into it,
and they should do
an administrative classify
document spillage investigation
they should provide
to all former residents
of the White House.
They should provide them all amnesty.
That way they can get full cooperate
from everybody and figure out really
what is going on
with the White House document
handling procedures
so that they can fix it.
When you have DOJ go into these things,
they are automatically going in
with all the criminal processes
and trying to threaten
people to go to jail over
something that really is
a procedural failure
and an institutional procedural failure
that has nothing to do with Mike Pence,
Donald Trump or quite frankly, Joe Biden.
All right.
We have to leave it there.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Appreciate. Clearly a lot to talk about.
Thank you for having me.