CNN legal analyst Elie Honig argued on Wednesday that the United States Department of Justice had effectively dropped the hammer on former President Donald Trump with its late-night filing detailing efforts to conceal the presence of top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Clearly DOJ had something on their minds, something was bugging them and they used this filing to unload all of that," he said. "The first thing that I think you take out of this filing is that, forget about these questions about whether DOJ acted too rationally, too suddenly when they executed the search warrant. they had no choice... the extent of the timeline and how long they were misled and lied to by Trump's attorneys, how many chances they gave Trump's attorneys to just hand over the documents... by a subpoena. They had to do this search warrant."
"One of the important details is that these documents were found not in the storage room... but in a desk in Donald Trump's office," he said. "I think that's really telling, gives us a sense of where they might go. The other thing is knowledge and intent: We keep talking about prosecutors would have to show Donald Trump knew what was in these documents, had criminal intent. The documents... couldn't be any more clearly marked, yellow and red, all caps, 'Secret,' 'Top Secret.'