During a recent interview on MSNBC, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who served in the Trump White House, claimed that she had seen the former president showing off what context clues suggested were classified documents to people in dining areas of his southern Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.
She’d been asked by host Alex Witt about the plausibility of Trump showing off some of these sensitive materials to uncleared third parties as alleged. One such incident entailed the now infamous gathering at a New Jersey property where he was caught on an audio recording seemingly agreeing that papers he was harboring would still need to be declassified before such protections were gone. The meeting took place after he left office, meaning he seemingly outlined right then and there that he didn’t take sweeping declassification action while president. “I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patios,” Grisham said. “So, he has no respect for classified information. Never did.”
“To be showing it to people that haven’t gone through the extreme vetting that you go through to get the clearance, it’s a disservice to the country, but it also puts people in danger potentially,” Grisham argued.
That’s something, of course, that’s come up elsewhere as well, considering the sensitive intelligence sources and methods — and national security-related information — found across some of what Trump kept. He has claimed he had the legal freedom to keep those materials, which is not true. The federal Presidential Records Act mandates that the federal National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) take possession of presidential records when a chief executive exits office. And despite Trump’s claims, there is no precedent among recent presidents for just taking White House records — and neither is Mar-a-Lago supposedly a fine place to store such records just because of what he’s characterized as heavy duty construction materials!
Trump could, in theory, face even more charges in the classified documents case, as the underlying investigation is actually continuing after his first indictment. Check out Grisham’s MSNBC interview below:
