Former Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal said Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that if anyone else had handled classified documents the way former President Donald Trump had, they would be indicted already in the Department of Justice’s classified document investigation.
Katyal said, “Trump is his own worst enemy when it comes to his legal troubles. He opens his mouth and all sorts of ways that implicate him even further.”
He continued, “The relevance of this whole story and this tape is not for the document itself. It’s about it goes to Trump’s state of mind. The defense he’s been articulating ever since the search on Mar-a-Lago is I declassified this stuff in my mind. I had a standing order. I took stuff out of the White House and it was automatically declassified. Here he’s saying there is a document I took out on the White House and that document is classified, therefore, I can’t show it to you. That blows a hole in the defense.”
Katyal added, “If this were any other person and they had admitted to what Donald Trump already admitted to, they’ll be in jail. That is not a hard case. That is why ultimately I think the trajectory of this investigation based on everything we have seen and how the case gets stronger and stronger with new pieces of information makes it very hard for Jack Smith to do anything else but to indict because if it were anyone else, there would be an indictment already.”
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