(OPINION) With news of the FBI raiding Mar-a-Lago, buzz quickly bubbled up Monday evening about whether former President Donald Trump could be disqualified from holding office again.
According to the Washington Examiner, The FBI search of the Florida resort was related to Trump’s handling of presidential records, including classified documents, after leaving office, sources told CNN. The search warrant was connected to the National Archives, a senior government official told NBC News.
Such reporting had Marc Elias, the top lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign who has drawn scrutiny for his role in pushing Trump-Russia collusion claims, pointing to U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2071. “The media is missing the really, really big reason why the raid today is a potential blockbuster in American politics,” Elias said in a tweet.
The passage that says anyone “having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States,” was the one he highlighted.
MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi, who served formerly as the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, also offered some words of caution. “First, I want to caution people. The majority of people in these cases … If we’re indeed correct that this is largely about a National Archives case, they don’t get charged, but then again, the majority of people turn over their documents,” he said on MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell’s show.
Convictions under U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2071 were previously debated during the 2016 presidential cycle after former Attorney General Michael Mukasey argued in 2015 that Hillary Clinton would be disqualified from holding office if convicted over erasing materials from a private email server she used while serving as secretary of state.
