Donald Trump’s “standing order” just went up in smoke
Donald Trump doesn’t really stand a chance in his classified documents criminal trial, but he’s going to try to find a way to carve out some slim odds of selling a reasonable doubt defense. Based on his rhetoric up to this point, he’s likely going to try to claim at trial that he’d given a “standing order” to declassify documents he dealt with.
But it turns out the DOJ and the ONDI have already conducted investigations in search of any evidence that Trump ever gave any such “standing order” while he was in office. According to Bloomberg, it turns out there’s no evidence that it ever happened.
This is good news because it means that yet another narrow door for claiming reasonable doubt has now been closed off to Donald Trump. He and his lawyers can claim all they want that Trump magically declassified everything while he was still in office. But since he won’t be able to produce a lick of evidence to support this claim, he’ll have an impossible time selling it to the jury.
