CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig joined Don Lemon Tonight Tuesday after the FBI filing on former President Donald Trump’s legal team’s motion to assign a special master in the case of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago became public. Special masters generally deal with attorney-client privilege, which would not apply in a case dealing with highly classified documents belonging to the United States government.
But Honig at first concentrated on a photo included in the filing, which appeared to show sensitive documents that didn’t appear to be secure.
“This is a national security nightmare,” Honig said, “to have documents of this level of sensitivity and classification splayed out on the floor of a hotel, I think the visual is quite visceral, and packs a punch, and really shows you what those agents found.”
Honig then addressed Trump’s claim of attorney-client privilege over the documents, many of which don’t fall under that purview.
“They said once we pulled out attorney client privilege documents and kept them away from the investigative teams,” Honig said, “we were left with, I believe it says double, approximately double the amount of documents that were given to us when we served a subpoena.”
CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem also appeared, where she spoke about the implications of the photo of unsecured classified documents.
“Mar-a-Lago was essentially just sort of an open book to anyone who was willing to come in,” Kayyem said. “I mean, those documents are not secure, not simply for anyone who’s randomly passing by, but, of course, for foreign intelligence agents or foreigners who might have interest in it.”
Don Lemon Tonight airs weeknights at 10 p.m. on CNN.
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