(CBrief) – An attorney for former President Donald Trump likely turned some heads during an interview Sunday after he was indicted by the Justice Department on 37 counts regarding his handling of classified materials when the issue came to a potential plea deal.
Speaking with Fox News’s Shannon Bream, attorney Alina Habba said she “could not imagine” any scenario where the former commander-in-chief would cop a deal with Biden’s DOJ, because that is akin to “an admission of guilt” and Trump has “done nothing wrong.”
“No, I could never imagine,” Habba told Bream. “I know I would never advise that. Especially when he’s not done anything wrong. You take a plea deal to make something go away. That’s an admission of guilt. He would never admit guilt because there was nothing wrong with declassifying documents, taking documents with you…”
“The only thing that was wrong was the raid on his home and the complete dual-tier system of justice that we’re seeing here when the Biden family is being treated completely differently than the Trump family,” she added. “So to plea is exactly what they would want.”
The indictment says that, as president, Trump “had lawful access to the most sensitive classified documents and national defense information gathered and owned by the United States government, including information from the agencies that comprise the United States Intelligence Community and the United States Department of Defense.”
Bream noted that, if he’s convicted, Trump faces “decades” behind bars — which would effectively be a death sentence.
“I don’t think he’s thinking of it that way, and I don’t really think that’s a realistic way to think about this case,” Habba responded. “He’s done nothing wrong. He said that. This is completely politically motivated. It’s election interference at its best by a political opponent. So to his credit, and the world should understand, an indictment is a one-sided document. He has a defense. The defense is real.”
“He had the Presidential Records Act, which only he has in play. Hillary Clinton didn’t have that. Biden didn’t have that, and we’ll put that defense on. The team he’s going to have will be strong and knows exactly what they’re doing,” she continued.
“He has every right to have classified documents that he declassified under the Presidential Records Act,” Habba said. “So, yes, they’re making it sound like a five–alarm fire. It’s not. It’s a very simple thing that everybody, and we’ve seen numerous people able to take it, and frankly, he was the only one that could take classified documents that he declassified under the Presidential Records Act. People forget that.”
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Others have suggested that Trump could be offered some sort of deal. Fox News co-host Geraldo Rivera took flak online for making a similar suggestion.
“As I have said consistently, President Biden should stop this tortured nonsense immediately,” Rivera noted on Twitter after news of Trump’s indictment broke. “In exchange for former President Trump dropping out of the race for the White House, Biden should pardon him for any and all federal allegations.”
In an interview on her own network following Trump’s indictment, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told colleague Lawrence O’Donnell: “But you have to wonder if the Justice Department is considering whether there is some political solution to this criminal problem.
“Whether part of the issue here is not just that Trump has committed crimes, but that Trump has committed crimes and plans on being back in the White House. Do they consider, as part of a potential plea offer, something that would proscribe him, proscribe him from running for office again? I don’t know,” she said.
She compared the situation to when the Justice Department reportedly brokered a deal with Richard Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew in the early 1970s, who resigned one year before the president during the Watergate scandal era.
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