Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said on Friday that former President Donald Trump should be indicted because he already “confessed” to taking highly classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving the White House last year.
“…It is long past time to arrest Donald Trump for his obvious crimes, his ongoing crimes. Crimes to which he has confessed,” Kirschner said in a video he posted to Twitter. “He actually said ‘I took these documents’ more openly and more transparently than other presidents. It is not like there is some challenge in proving that Donald Trump took the documents openly and transparently.”
Kirschner said that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is treating Trump differently as it continues to investigate his mishandling of classified documents, which were seized by FBI agents in August following an approval from Attorney General Merrick Garland. Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in regard to the documents and said that any classified documents that he took had already been declassified.
“You need to treat the former president, the way you treat every other American who commits crimes,” Kirschner added, referring to the way the DOJ is handling its investigation. “And Donald Trump is being treated better than and different than everybody else who commits any kind of crimes that are comparable, mishandles classified information and it’s wrong and it’s gotta stop.”
The DOJ recently asked Washington, D.C., District Chief Judge Beryl Howell to hold Trump’s office in contempt of court for failing to comply with a subpoena that was issued in May that required the former president to return all classified documents.
However, the federal judge on Friday refused to hold Trump or his legal team in contempt of court and asked the DOJ to handle the issue itself, ABC News reported. Had Judge Howell agreed to hold the ex-president in contempt, he would have been fined on a daily basis until he complied with the subpoena’s requirements.
Kirschner on Friday said that Judge Howell was right to decline the DOJ’s request and criticized the DOJ’s prolonged process in indicting Trump as federal prosecutors asked Trump’s lawyers to certify twice that the former president gave back all classified information and that no more documents were still at Mar-a-Lago, according to The Guardian.
“What Judge Howell was saying in substance ‘do your job‘ and frankly it makes [the] DOJ look weak and feckless…unwilling or unable to deal with the crimes of Donald Trump,” Kirschner said, adding later that “the federal judges have been telling the DOJ for a very long time ‘take care of this problem.'”
Kirschner said that the DOJ is putting Trump a “little above the law” by not treating him the same way any American who commits crimes would be treated.
“If somebody robs a bank. First of all, we typically don’t subpoena the bank robber and say ‘can you please return all the money you stole to the bank or maybe bring it to the grand jury pursuant to this subpoena. No, you get a search warrant and an arrest warrant and you lock up the bank robber for the crime he committed, but that’s not the way [the] DOJ decided to go with Donald Trump,” Kirschner added.
Hundreds of documents with sensitive material were recovered from Trump’s house during the court-authorized search. Those documents reportedly included information about nuclear programs and highly classified programs. Meanwhile, one of Trump’s lawyers said in June that all classified documents were returned, but the FBI found evidence that suggested that he still kept more sensitive records.
Trump on Friday criticized authorities for taking the documents from his house.
“Under the Presidential Records Act and the very well established Clinton Socks Case, the raid of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI, and the taking of documents and many other items, was ILLEGAL,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Everything should be returned, at once!”
Further expressing his dissatisfaction with the way the DOJ is handling the Mar-a-Lago investigation, Kirschner said, “I am not sure when the Department of Justice is gonna get the message or get the memo that they need to indict Donald Trump for his crimes.”