Jack Smith suspected Trump kept docs for financial gain -- but sources highlight another motive
Special counsel Jack Smith strongly suspected that President Donald Trump took some classified records after he left office in 2021 because they could help him financially, but Smith and his team later concluded they could not prove this was his motive, MS NOW has learned.
Early in his tenure, Smith was “laser-focused” on establishing whether financial gain was one of Trump’s driving motives in taking and concealing classified documents after he left the White House, according to two people familiar with the case. The special counsel tasked his team with tracking down the connection between some documents in Trump’s possession which, according to an internal memo MS NOW obtained, contained intelligence related to Trump’s businesses.
But by late spring and early summer of 2023, as Smith’s team was secretly presenting evidence to a grand jury in Florida about Trump’s mishandling of these top-secret records, Smith and his prosecutors determined their clearest conclusion was that Trump kept the records out of an egotistical belief that he should be allowed to keep them — and also that the records were “cool” to have, the people said.
A January 2023 case memo that MS NOW obtained this week revived the long-simmering questions about what motivated Trump to take hundreds of pages of top-secret records when he lost his re-election bid. The special counsel’s office memo said the FBI found numerous records in its 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago that were connected to Trump’s business interests, and said it established a financial motive as a reason Trump kept them.
The law doesn’t require establishing a person’s motive in order to convict them of the crime of mishandling classified records, but like any prosecutors, Smith and his team were keen to determine it and describe it to a jury at trial, according to the people, who asked to speak confidentially to discuss a sensitive probe.
https://www.ms.now/news/jack-smith-trump-classified-documents-financial-motive
Very juvenile, but what do you expect?
= new reply since forum marked as read
