Trump's tweets central to legal cases on dossier, travel ban and more
By Katelyn Polantz, CNN
Updated 7:32 AM ET, Thu December 28, 2017
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump's tweet Tuesday morning calling the Russia dossier "bogus" is already being used to argue that intelligence agencies should release a related government summary of the contentious document. Every time Trump on Twitter calls the dossier fake, he could be acknowledging that the intelligence community investigated it and presented to him their findings, according to a court filing Tuesday from lawyers who seek official government information about the dossier.
In this case and others, the President's prolific use of Twitter continues to complicate his administration's arguments. The court actions that mention Trump's tweets now stretch across a wide variety of issues, including the official handling of the dossier, immigration policy, who should run an independent agency and First Amendment rights. In many of the cases, a judge's ruling on the President's tweets could carve out a new area of law. In some cases, Trump's tweets may be official statements from the President, government lawyers have argued.
"Legally speaking, the tweets are quite significant. They provide a window into his beliefs and motivations," said Neal Katyal, the former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration who is leading a case that opposes Trump's travel ban. But federal courts are still weighing how much the statements in Trump's tweets reveal about his presidential actions. Lawyers for the James Madison Project, a government transparency advocacy group, and Politico told a federal court Tuesday that Trump's tweets are public statements, and thus show that he knows the intelligence agencies vetted the document.
So far, lawyers for the government haven't responded to the latest argument. In previous court filings and in an appearance in November before the judge, the administration's lawyers said that the President's tweets signify nothing about what Trump knows of the intelligence work. The tweet could be evidence that Trump watched news reports about the dossier or that he'd know first-hand the truth of the accusations about him, Trump's legal team said.
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http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/28/politics/trump-tweets-legal-cases-official-statements/index.html
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