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Deadline Legal Blog-The White House's stance on Trump's classified documents case gets the facts backward
The Justice Department declined to move forward with the president’s federal criminal cases after he won the election, not before.
The White House’s stance on Trump’s classified documents case gets the facts backward - MS NOW apple.news/AFcMrlCPuRU6...
— (@oc88.bsky.social) 2026-03-25T17:21:05.913Z
https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/trump-classified-documents-case-white-house-business-purposes
Responding to new reporting that Jack Smith had gathered evidence that Donald Trump stole sensitive government documents for business reasons, the White House said Trump “did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory.”
Several things are wrong or misleading in that brief statement. .....
Rather, I’m going to focus on the White House’s backward chronology.
Trump didn’t “defeat” his federal prosecutions “and then” win the 2024 election. Instead, he won the election and then the Justice Department declined to move forward in the classified documents and 2020 election interference cases, citing its internal policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.
Whether that procedural burial counts as a “defeat” or an “eas[y]” one I’ll leave to the reader. But the order of events matters.
The president had pleaded not guilty in both federal cases (he pleaded not guilty in all four of his prosecutions; the only one that went to trial, the New York state hush money case, ended in a conviction that’s on appeal). But whether he “did nothing wrong,” as the White House put it, is something that juries never got a chance to consider.
When the election case was dropped, the trial judge was considering how much of it could go forward after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
In the documents case, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed it before trial on the grounds that Smith had been unlawfully appointed. The DOJ dropped its appeal of the Trump-appointed judge’s dismissal after he won the 2024 election.
Cannon has continued to rule in favor of keeping Smith’s report on the documents case secret. The report’s release is the subject of its own pending appeal, the result of which could shed more light on whether Trump “did nothing wrong.”
Several things are wrong or misleading in that brief statement. .....
Rather, I’m going to focus on the White House’s backward chronology.
Trump didn’t “defeat” his federal prosecutions “and then” win the 2024 election. Instead, he won the election and then the Justice Department declined to move forward in the classified documents and 2020 election interference cases, citing its internal policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.
Whether that procedural burial counts as a “defeat” or an “eas[y]” one I’ll leave to the reader. But the order of events matters.
The president had pleaded not guilty in both federal cases (he pleaded not guilty in all four of his prosecutions; the only one that went to trial, the New York state hush money case, ended in a conviction that’s on appeal). But whether he “did nothing wrong,” as the White House put it, is something that juries never got a chance to consider.
When the election case was dropped, the trial judge was considering how much of it could go forward after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
In the documents case, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed it before trial on the grounds that Smith had been unlawfully appointed. The DOJ dropped its appeal of the Trump-appointed judge’s dismissal after he won the 2024 election.
Cannon has continued to rule in favor of keeping Smith’s report on the documents case secret. The report’s release is the subject of its own pending appeal, the result of which could shed more light on whether Trump “did nothing wrong.”
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