An attorney for former President Donald Trump seemed to admit that the highly sensitive documents seized from Mar-a-Lago when the FBI executed a search warrant last month weren’t kept in the most secure of settings.
In fact, Alina Habba said on Fox News on Wednesday that the files were kept in an office where Trump “frequently” had guests.
Habba took issue with a photo the Justice Department included in its legal brief detailing the reason for the search warrant and what was discovered. That image showed top secret documents and other classified materials, with key information covered up, arranged on the floor:
“I do have firsthand knowledge, as you know. I have been down there, I’m down there frequently,” Habba told Sean Hannity. “I have never seen that. I have never, ever seen that. That is not the way his office looks. Anybody that knows President Trump’s office, he has guests frequently there, it’s just a joke.”
The documents recovered during the search included highly sensitive materials that should only be kept in a secured facility. While Trump’s team has previously claimed that anything he had at Mar-a-Lago was kept secure, Habba’s admission that these items were actually in a room where he “frequently” had guests was unlikely to help his case.
Trump’s attorneys, advisers and insiders have come up with a number of unusual defenses for this stash of sensitive documents.
Rudy Giuliani, who served as Trump’s attorney after he lost the 2020 election, recently claimed Trump was just keeping them safe. And Trump attorney Christina Bobb said on Fox News that the documents were secure at Mar-a-Lago because “only certain members of staff can get there, and then there’s only one key” and “a limited number of people” had access to that area.
Habba raised eyebrows earlier in the day during another interview when she claimed the potential charge of espionage was “mundane.”
Observers were flummoxed by Habba’s latest comments: