Sean Hannity’s latest segment with Trump lawyer Alina Habba neatly illustrates this Trial by Fox News effect. But, by showing how aggressively Trump propagandists must contort to obfuscate the actual legal case against Trump, it also demonstrates the weakness of his defenses.
A statement from Habba on Hannity’s show Wednesday night is going viral: She said the now-infamous photo of documents on Trump’s office floor must be a setup because his office is infallibly tidy.
“That is not the way his office looks,” Habba said, later adding, “He has guests frequently there.”
As the Justice Department’s latest filing revealed, Trump hoarded government documents in places well beyond Mar-a-Lago’s storage room, including three found stashed in his office desks. And so, many pointed out that Habba’s statement revealed Trump brought outsiders into a place improperly housing classified documents.
That’s welcome comic relief. What’s more interesting is how Hannity and Habba skirted around the most damning arguments, not engaging them at all, inadvertently showing that Trump has no good answer to them.
Trump’s lawyers may now be potential witnesses. A big question is whether Trump authorized his lawyers to produce a sworn statement saying a “diligent search” for remaining government documents had been conducted, a statement revealed as highly misleading when the FBI search in early August retrieved many more. Such an order from Trump might constitute evidence of obstruction.
If you had a Trump lawyer such as Habba on your show, you might ask about this. Hannity didn’t.
Nor was there real discussion about how another Trump claim has collapsed: that he had the right as president to declassify whatever he wanted. It’s not clear he had declassified the documents found in his possession, and under three statutes at issue, violations don’t even have to involve classified information.
But that aside, the Justice Department filing recounts that at critical moments, Trump’s own lawyers treated some hoarded documents as classified and didn’t tell federal agents Trump had declassified them.
If you had a Trump lawyer on your show, you might ask directly: If Trump’s defense is that he declassified the documents, why didn’t Trump’s own lawyers act like he had done this?
Instead, Habba was permitted to spin. Trump was “allowed” to declassify the materials, Habba said. “Nobody talks about that. Instead, they look at the three statutes that they brought.”
Another natural follow up might be: What’s your answer to the fact that those statutes can be violated whether or not the relevant information is classified? But Hannity did not ask this, either.
Perhaps most comical was the exchange between Hannity and a Fox News legal analyst. The analyst noted that proving Trump obstructed the government investigation (into his withholding of documents that first the National Archives and then the FBI had demanded) requires proving corrupt intent.
“Where is evidence of that?” the analyst asked. “If the president truly thought he had a right to access and custody of these presidential papers, there’s no corrupt intent here.”
In other words, it’s established fact that Trump didn’t have any corrupt intent because he didn’t have any corrupt intent.
It’s possible the Justice Department might ultimately conclude that corrupt intent cannot be shown conclusively enough…
Read More: Opinion | Trump lawyer Alina Habba’s ludicrous spin to Sean Hannity unmasks the Fox ruse
