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Politics
Liam O'Dell
Aug 19, 2022
Related video: Rudy Giuliani says Trump should have pardoned himself
Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense
Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the man who brought us the meme that is Four Seasons Total Landscaping, is now being ridiculed for claiming the ex-US president merely wanted to “preserve” classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Donald Trump’s residence was searched by the FBI earlier this month, with agents said to have seized documents marked ‘top secret’ from the property. The search warrant for the Florida raid revealed Mr Trump was accused of violating 18 US Code 793 – part of the Espionage Act.
This section of US law relates to “gathering, transmitting or losing defence information”.
The warrant also alleges Mr Trump breached 18 US Code 1519 (“destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and bankruptcy”) and 18 US Code 2071 (“concealment, removal, or mutilation generally”).
All of this means Mr Giuliani’s comments to the news channel Newsmax aren’t exactly accurate.
A shocking discovery from a very knowledgeable individual who definitely didn’t have his Washington law license suspended last year, right?
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He said: “Now they want to make [Trump] responsible for having taken classified documents and preserve [sic] them. Really, if you look at the Espionage Act, it’s not really about taking the documents; it’s about destroying them, or hiding them, or giving them to the enemy.
“It’s not about taking them and putting them in a place that’s roughly as safe as they were in as the first place.”
Except as mentioned above, there’s just the small issue of Mr Trump also being investigated over the “destruction” and “concealment” of documents.
Oops.
And so naturally, the ridicule of Mr Giuliani on social media soon followed suit:
\u201c@atrupar Rudy Giuliani should do stand-up comedy.\u201d— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1660878696
\u201c@atrupar Yeah if there's one thing the National Archive is not good at, it's preserving documents. Best to keep them in a storage room at an old resort.\u201d— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1660878696
\u201ctfw your lawyer goes on tv to talk about what the espionage act is about without having read the espionage act\u201d— southpaw (@southpaw) 1660915909
\u201c"If you look at the Espionage Act, it\u2019s not really about taking the documents, it\u2019s about destroying them or hiding them..."\ud83e\udd74\n\nTrump is literally being investigated over if he broke two other laws that bar the concealment (18 USC 2071) & destruction (18 USC 1519) of records\u201d— Sonam Sheth (@Sonam Sheth) 1660879608
Others offered up their own analogies to point out the flaw in Mr Giuliani’s argument:
\u201c@atrupar Bank robber to police: \u201cI was just trying to put the money in a safe place.\u201d\u201d— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1660878696
\u201c@atrupar "Really officer, I just felt that the bank's money would be a lot safer under my bed."\u201d— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1660878696
\u201cThe reason I took your car was because I wanted to make sure it was safe.\u201d— Warren Leight (@Warren Leight) 1660913580
\u201cBy putting the bags of money in a crawl space, the bank robber was just trying to preserve the currency by putting it in a safe place.\u201d— George Conway\ud83c\udf3b (@George Conway\ud83c\udf3b) 1660879995
We’re very much here for the former lawyer attempting to defend Mr Trump only to make things a whole lot worse – it’s the chaos we live for.
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