Jack Smith shreds Stephen Miller legal group's complaint about NARA criminal referral
Source: Law & Crime
Mar 14th, 2024, 10:48 am
Ahead of Thursday morning’s much anticipated motion hearing on former President Donald Trump’s bids to dismiss his Espionage Act indictment on grounds of unconstitutional vagueness and the Presidential Records Act (PRA), special counsel Jack Smith responded to America First Legal Foundation’s (AFL) “untenable theory” that the National Archives’ (NARA) criminal referral violated the law.
AFL, a legal group headed by former Trump White House senior advisor Stephen Miller, made an entrance into the case as amicus curiae — a friend of the court — with arguments supporting the Trump defense’s attempt to get the Mar-a-Lago willful retention of national defense information and obstruction case tossed under the PRA.
AFL claimed to have “uncovered” proof that NARA committed an “unlawful abuse of executive authority” through its criminal referral to the Department of Justice, a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act that the group submitted should be enough to dismiss the indictment.
Smith previously attacked the claims of an improper criminal referral as “fundamentally wrong” because even even if Trump had a valid PRA argument, that didn’t give him “license” to obstruct a grand jury probe nor grant him a “free pass” for the same “based on his legal claim that those entities lacked authority to investigate.”
Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/jack-smith-shreds-stephen-miller-legal-groups-complaint-about-nara-criminal-referral-with-absurd-example-of-how-untenable-theory-would-apply-in-real-world/
Full headline: Jack Smith shreds Stephen Miller legal group’s complaint about NARA criminal referral with absurd example of how ‘untenable theory’ would apply in real world
Link to Smith filing (PDF) - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.400.0.pdf
The OP article is good as it includes an excerpt of Smith's argument that basically highlights what I have been yelling about the past couple years - the "regulatory agencies" cannot unilaterally go to court on their own - they use DOJ for that, and THAT is what NARA did here for this classified documents (and other items that were illegally removed under their purview) case AFTER they exhausted all of their normal procedures for retrieving covered (non-personal) items/documents. When NARA realized that they were getting the run-around, they FINALLY, after A YEAR referred the problem to DOJ to take court-approved actions (subpoenas, warrants for search and seizure, etc).
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TY!
