Donald Trump’s legal team has acknowledged the possibility that the former president could be indicted amid the investigation into his retention of government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Despite Trump’s claiming days earlier that he couldn’t imagine being charged, his lawyers made the stark admission that he could be in a court filing on Monday proposing how to conduct an outside review of documents that were seized by the FBI in August.
A “special master” – a court official appointed to help administer the review process, the federal judge Raymond Dearie – had previously asked Trump to detail any materials stored at Mar-a-Lago that he may have decided to declassify.
In the court filing, Trump’s lawyers – who had successfully pushed for the special master’s appointment – said that requiring him to do so could hurt any possible defense should he later be charged, and that he should not have to “fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident” during the review.
Dearie was set to have his first meeting with Trump’s lawyers and their opponents in the case, the US justice department’s prosecutors, on Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn. He reportedly rejected the Trump side’s request to delay asserting what materials he may have classified.