WATCH: Trump SLAMS Special Counsel Jack Smith, Declares His Innocence Through The Presidential Records Act

On Monday, the first part of the explosive Fox News interview between 45th President and leading 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump and Fox News’ Bret Baier was released. During this eye-opening interview, Donald Trump held back no punches.


“Can you believe it? An arrest by my opponent,” Trump said.

"Why not just hand them over then?" Baier asked.

"Because I had boxes. I want to go through the boxes and get my personal things out. I don’t want to hand that over to NARA yet. And I very was busy as you’ve sort of seen," he Trump answered.

“I have every right to have those boxes. This is purely a presidential records act. This is not a criminal thing. In fact, the New York Times had a story just the other day that the only way NARA could ever get this stuff back would be, ‘Please, please, please, could we have it back?’” Trump explained.

"Before I send boxes over, I have to take my things out. These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things,” Trump said.

Earlier this month, Trump pleaded not guilty to all 37 fraudulent counts relating to him supposedly “mishandling” classified documents from Special Counsel Jack Smith.
 

President Trump turned Jack Smith’s frivolous federal indictment of him on its head as he cites the Presidential Records Act as a defense.

Senior Attorney Michael Bekesha, a man who lost a case against former President Bill Clinton for taking White House audiotapes when he left office and kept them in his sock drawer, explains Clinton was safe because he was a President who saw it fit to take the documents before his term ended.

"The same is true with Mr. Trump," Bekesha writes in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

He adds, "Mr. Trump, like Mr. Clinton, took those boxes with him when he left office. As of noon on Jan. 20, 2021, whatever remained at the White House was presidential records. Whatever was taken by Mr. Trump wasn’t. That was the position of the Justice Department in 2010 and the ruling by Judge Jackson in 2012."

In an op-ed by former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on Substack, he concludes that a "[c]riminal indictment of former president has no legitimate basis."

“The bottom line is that if Mr. Trump or his lawyers allege — even without his testifying — that he declassified the documents, a criminal charge of unauthorized possession of classified documents will be difficult to prove. That doesn’t mean that a prosecutor could not get a grand jury to indict this particular ham sandwich. It does mean that it’s unlikely that a conviction against Mr. Trump would be sustainable,” Dershowitz writes.

“Based on what we know, we believe that there is no legitimate basis for a criminal indictment of Mr. Trump based on the material that was found at Mar-a-Lago,” Dershowitz concludes.

You can follow Reed Cooper on Instagram here, Truth Social here, and Twitter here.