Sarah Bedford says Presidential Records Act has not been ‘aggressively enforced’ until Trump
Julia Johnson
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The Washington Examiner’s Sarah Bedford noted that the charges against former President Donald Trump, levied by the Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, amount to a violation of the Presidential Records Act. She further claimed that the act hasn’t “been aggressively enforced” in this manner, and the indictment of Trump seems to be selective.
Reacting to Trump’s interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier which aired on Monday evening, Bedford said, “I think that was a pretty important preview of what is likely to be at the heart of Trump’s defense.”
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In the interview, Trump said, “Like every other president, I take things out.”
“In my case, I took it out pretty much in a hurry, but people packed it up, and we left. And I had clothing in there. I had all sorts of personal items,” he explained.
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He further claimed that the PRA gave him authority to declassify materials, telling Baier, “everything was declassified.”
“If you strip away the sensational stuff about aides wearing wires, comments that Trump made where he seemed to brag about documents — we don’t know the context of the conversation yet — all of the stuff that Trump’s adversaries and that prosecutors are pointing to say they have a slam dunk case. If you strip all that away, what you have at the heart of this case is a potential violation of the Presidential Records Act,” she explained to host Cheryl Casone on Fox Business.
The PRA “has never really been criminal before,” she added. It also “has never been aggressively enforced before.”
According to Bedford, “It has been treated in other cases like maybe a speeding ticket if an executive branch official violates the Presidential Records Act.”
“A lot of other figures have been permitted to go through their own records, Hillary Clinton most notably, and determine which are private and which go back to the government without the government seeking to sort of check her work so-to-speak,” she said.
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“I think the defense is going to focus on, at the end of the day, what you have is a violation of a law that has never been enforced this way, and the prosecution of Trump for that is selective,” she previewed.
Trump was federally indicted earlier this month on 31 counts for the willful retention of national defense information, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of withholding a document or record, one count of corruptly concealing a document or record, one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, one count for a scheme to conceal, and one count related to alleged false statements.