One of the arguments Democrats and the Biden administration are trying to use to keep President Donald Trump off the 2024 presidential ballot is the dispute over the documents Trump had after his presidency.
Biden’s prosecutors say he violated the law by having those papers and have brought a case against him, even though both Joe Biden and Mike Pence were found to have had similar documents, and no cases have been brought against them so far.
But now a report explains how Trump actually may be protected from those charges because of a precedent established by Barack Obama when he was in office.
At that time, there were separate hacks, allegedly by Russia, into White House systems, and Obama created an office for an information technology director as well as an Executive Committee for Presidential Information Technology.
According to a report from the Washington Examiner, “Obama’s March 2015 PITC memorandum established the president’s ‘exclusive control’ over information resources provided to the president, the vice president, and the EOP. Moreover, it made clear that any records sent to EOP systems or records stemming from those systems are controlled by the president.”
The precedent is now being investigated by America First Legal, which is demanding details through a Freedom of Information Act process.
”Because of President Obama’s executive action, President Trump could reasonably have concluded that all information provided to him in office was within his exclusive control,” the organization explained in a letter to the government.
It references the case against Trump brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
AFL, headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, shared exclusively with the Washington Examiner its six-page FOIA request “seeking to understand more about a'secretive' information technology committee created by former President Barack Obama after a fall 2014 foreign cyberattack breached an unclassified network that serves the Executive Office of the President,” the report said.
President Trump has denied being guilty of any of the charges brought by Smith over his handling of documents, including classified documents, as he left office.
Smith has claimed Trump “was not authorized to possess or retain those classified documents” found at Trump’s Florida home, which was raided by commando-type federal officers with Joe Biden’s knowledge.
It is Obama’s memo that “may have created a reasonable belief in President Trump that he, in fact, had such authority,” the AFL said. “Additionally, if the records Trump allegedly destroyed are still preserved within the EOP or the U.S. Department of Defense as part of PITC-created information systems, then other claims in the indictment may be baseless.”
via wnd