Following news of former President Trump’s indictment on seven federal charges in the classified documents case, Trump lawyer Jim Trusty has come out swinging in multiple television appearances. During an interview with CNN, Trusty accused federal prosecutors of attempting to extort the lawyer for a key witness in the case and on ABC, he decried the Department of Justice’s unequal application of the law. Trusty also appeared on NBC’s Today Show, Fox News, and NewsNation Friday morning to defend his client, whom he insists did nothing wrong.
Trusty told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that federal prosecutor Jay Bratt, head of the counterintelligence section of DOJ’s National Security Division, and five other federal prosecutors threatened Stanley Woodward, a lawyer representing Walt Nauta, Trump’s former body man. “This is the guy who wanted to do a raid before they even had a subpoena out,’ he said of Bratt.
Trusty said that during a meeting, the federal prosecutors brought up a judgeship that Woodward had applied for, and suggested they sought to use the information as “extortion” leverage.
“He apparently, along with five other people in his presence from DOJ, extorted a very well respected, very intelligent lawyer from Washington DC, saying essentially, if you want this judgeship that’s on Joe Biden’s desk, you have to flip your guy to cooperate against the President of the United States,” Trusty said.
Nauta, who served as a military aide to the president in the White House, was also indicted in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the mishandling of classified documents, CNN reported Friday. The specific charges against Nauta have not been revealed.
Trump responded to Nauta’s indictment on his social media Friday, writing, “They are trying to destroy his life, like the lives of so many others, hoping that he will say bad things about ‘Trump.’ He is strong, brave, and a Great Patriot. The FBI and DOJ are CORRUPT!”
Trusty referenced a report in the Guardian about the meeting in which prosecutors tried to strongarm Nauta’s lawyer into cooperating with them.
Woodward reportedly submitted a letter, now filed under seal, to Chief Judge James Boasberg of U.S. District Court in Washington describing the alleged incident.
“Bratt then turned to Woodward and remarked that he did not think that Woodward was a ‘Trump guy’ and that ‘he would do the right thing,’ before noting that he knew Woodward had submitted an application to be a judge at the superior court in Washington DC that was currently pending, the letter said,” according to the Guardian.
Trusty said it was a serious allegation.
“This is no political talker. This is something that was reported at the time by the attorney. It has been basically sworn to by him he’s written a letter that’s been submitted to a US District Court Judge confirming it happened. And and I think it’d be really interesting to find out whether DOJ whether the five people have sat in the room and watch that extortion have threads of text messages or emails where they comment about that,” he said.
Trusty brought up the “discovery” process as a way to gather information regarding the prosecutorial misconduct. “So we’re going to want some discovery about just how far ranging this criminal activity was by prosecutors,” he said.
According to Trusty, the DOJ brushed off the allegations after they were raised. “We got an email from the guy who actually did the extortion message from DOJ … [that] they’re not going to worry about their own dirty house,” he said.
Trusty also said Trump was innocent of the charges against him.
“He is innocent. I mean, everything about this case is absolutely rotten,” he complained, adding that attorney general is hiding behind Jack Smith, who was recently described as “the DOJ hatchet man tasked to target Trump,” by investigative journalist Lee Smith.
In an interview Friday morning with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trusty pointed out the obvious double standard at play in Joe Biden’s weaponized Justice Department.
“You’ve got these investigations in Delaware that are a thousand times more serious [into] a sitting president who has authorized his DOJ to try to sink the candidacy of his prime opposition while that guy has unsecured documents that he stole out of a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] dozens of years ago!” Trusty exclaimed.
“What are you talking about sir? What are you talking about? That is a ridiculous statement!” Stephanopoulos scoffed in response.
“Nice try!” Trusty shot back. “There’s an issue that anyone who reads newspapers would agree is a parallel track, which is the Delaware document scandal of Joe Biden where there’s a special counsel, Rob Hur, that’s investigating it.
Earlier this year, the FBI found at least 20 highly classified papers marked at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level at the Penn Biden Center. The materials reportedly involved Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom, among other foreign countries.
When Biden was leaving office in January 2017, longtime Biden aide Kathy S. Chung helped pack 13 boxes with files from his office cabinets and store them at a transition office nearby, according to investigative reporter Paul Sperry. Chung is a key witness in Biden’s classified documents probe with possible ties to the Chinese Communist Party. She was involved in another documents scandal while working at the Commerce Department with Hunter Biden during the Clinton administration, Sperry reported at RealClearInvestigations.
A partial transcript of Chung’s recent deposition taken behind closed doors at the Capitol revealed that in the summer of 2017, “Chung reloaded the boxes in her car and moved them to a private office that she leased in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, before they ended up early the next year at the China-funded Penn Biden Center in D.C.,” Sperry reported.
The boxes turned out to contain dozens of highly classified documents, including ones so secret they could only be viewed in a Sensitive Compartment Information Facility, or SCIF. Yet they were found last year in an unlocked storage room at the center that required no key to access. (The White House initially claimed, falsely, they were stored in a “locked closet.”) Prosecutors are investigating the chain of custody of those loosely stored intelligence papers to determine whether any were copied or passed through foreign hands.
Chung, who held a Top Secret security clearance and had experience handling and identifying classified documents, told congressional investigators she was unaware the boxes contained classified material – even though some of the file folders in the boxes were emblazoned with cover sheets stating they contained secret government documents. She insisted she never noticed any classified papers or saw any classified markings, even though she unpacked the boxes when she relocated them to the center and then re-packed them last summer at the request of Biden’s lawyers.
“You know that there were documents that were sensitive or marked classified found in a garage near a corvette that made their way through Chinatown, through the Penn Biden Center. There’s 1,850 boxes that have never been fully looked at the University of Delaware. You have the ultimate unclean hands of a current sitting president who had no declassification protections of President Trump and who literally had to have stolen stuff from a SCIF.
“Even [Illinois Democrat Senator] Dick Durbin has commented about how this was an outrageous possession of classified material by the vice president at that point, Joe Biden,” Trusty added. “So that’s what we’re talking about. You can scoff and act like there’s nothing to it, but the whole country knows the basic notion of unequal treatment and fairness, and that’s what’s at issue with this prosecution.”