Former President Donald Trump was charged with additional felonies by special counsel Jack Smith over the storage of classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago estate.
In an updated indictment handed down Thursday, prosecutors allege that Trump asked a staffer to delete camera footage at his Florida estate in an effort to obstruct the federal investigation into his possession of classified documents.
Trump got the news just as he was sitting down for an interview with conservative website Breitbart — and he had something to say.
“I just heard it as I’m sitting down. This is harassment. This is election interference,” Trump said when asked about the new charges.
“I’m protected by the Presidential Records Act totally,” he continued. “It shouldn’t even be a case. It’s not a criminal case.”
Then he shifted to the attack, claiming President Joe Biden kept more classified documents from his time in the White House — but isn’t facing charges. Prosecutors have charged Trump over his attempts to keep the documents, and said Biden cooperated… despite having held the classified documents in storage far longer than the 45th president.
“Where’s Biden with all the documents? He’s got 20 times, 30 times the documents I have, and he has not made it easy for them either. He has been hiding boxes,” Trump claimed. “They’re sending boxes to Chinatown. Boxes are being sent to Chinatown, and yet China is paying them millions of dollars. You explain that one.”
“You don’t even hear about it. All you hear about is Trump,” he said. “No, this is a two-tier system of injustice. That’s what we have.”
“We have a sick country. Our country is very sick right now,” Trump concluded. “We have a failing nation and it’s a very sad thing to watch.”
Not everyone is as confident. A former attorney for Trump, Ty Cobb, told CNN the new charges are “overwhelming” for Trump’s defense.
“I know you’ve read through the new indictment, you’ve bane able to compare every count, see the document added, which appears to be those [classified Iranian] attack plans. They now have the proof it was not,” CNN’s Erin Burnett told Cobb. ” It was actually a document he was waving around. As you go through everything in this new 60-page superseding indictment, what stands out to you?”
“The evidence is so overwhelming,” Cobb claimed. “It’s very difficult to imagine how Trump could say, how that his lawyers met with Jack Smith’s today to explain to him that he hadn’t done anything wrong on the same day that Jack Smith produces this evidence, overwhelming evidence of additional wrongdoing on his part.”
If true, Cobb claims the new charges show Trump was “going behind the back of his own lawyers and dealing with two people who were extremely loyal to him.”
But a Trump campaign spokesman later dismissed the new charges as part of a “continued desperate and flailing attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their Department of Justice to harass President Trump and those around him.”
The Horn editorial team