His cooperation turns out to be irrelevant. When an unauthorized person is found to have top secret and SCI documents (most secret of top secrets) in their house, they are in trouble, ex-president or not. I guess Trump could claim it was just an accident in packing. But these documents are kept under lock and key. A specific person always has assigned custody.
The DOJ should ask for all of Trump's presidential documents because they are government property. Obama did not take any of his president documents. The National Archives took them all as they should. Then the Obama foundation ask and paid for digital copies of essentially all of his presidential records. This is the legal and correct way for a president to get copies of all his presidential records but when has Trump every done anything the legal and correct way. He takes what he wants and fights it out in court. This time when he took top secret documents, it's going to be a lot bigger problem for him.
Trump never touched that stuff. The records folks packed it for him and had it shipped to Mara-logo.
They had to have planted anything that might be Top Secret.
On Hannity tonight John Salomon said that Trump made a habit of declassifying everything he touched personally because he knew the FBI would pull a stunt like this...even when he was president.
This little known fact will soon come out.
Legal experts say presidents have absolute authority to declassify documents, but it's not clear whether Trump ever took action to do so.
www.nbcnews.com
"The 1978
Presidential Records Act, which requires presidents to turn over documents to the National Archives at the end of their administration, lacks an enforcement mechanism, but there are multiple federal laws regarding the handling of classified documents. Trump signed
one such law in 2018, increasing the penalty for "unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material" from one year to five years in prison.
But those in Trump’s orbit say that no president is personally bound by the removal and retention rules governing classified documents, which can be declassified if the president simply says they are, according to Ric Grenell, who was Trump’s acting director of national intelligence and who handled highly classified information.
“There is no approval process for the president of the United States to declassify intelligence. There is this phony idea that he must provide notification for declassification but that’s just silly. Who is he supposed to notify? I think it’s the height of swampism to think the president should seek bureaucrats’ approval,” Grenell told NBC News, emphasizing that he wasn’t personally speaking for the president.
Trump himself said on his Truth Social platform Friday, "It was all declassified.""