Brian Greer on Silent Witnesses
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2023
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
The indictment filed last week against former President Donald Trump involves hundreds of classified documents, and the first 31 charges involve mishandling individual classified documents. This raises the specter of the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, which is the major instrument through which we handle classified material in criminal cases. How do you prove that the former president mishandled classified information without presenting a lot of classified information in open court?
Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Brian Greer, former CIA lawyer and the man behind the @secretsandlaws Twitter account, to talk about the Justice Department's options for presenting these 31 documents in court, about whether they can be declassified, and about whether the department can use something called the “silent witness rule.”
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Transcript
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | I think they'll decide no matter what. |
| 0:35.0 | Look, we have no choice but basically to trust him and his cleared lawyers. |
| 0:41.0 | And push over a lot of discovery. |
| 0:43.0 | Let's not waste time with a bunch of redactions. |
| 0:45.0 | Let's not waste time with a bunch of summaries. |
| 0:47.0 | It's going to slow everything down and just create a peelable issue. |
| 0:49.0 | So I think they'll take a much lighter approach on a lot of these SEPA issues, |
| 0:53.0 | at least in the discovery context, than they wouldn't in a normal case. |
| 0:57.0 | I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the LawFair podcast June 12, 2023. |
| 1:05.0 | The indictment filed last week against former President Donald Trump |
| 1:09.0 | involves hundreds of classified documents, |
| 1:13.0 | and the first 31 charges involve mishandling individual classified documents. |
| 1:21.0 | This raises the specter of the classified information procedures act, |
| 1:25.0 | otherwise known as SEPA, which is the major instrument through which we handle classified material in criminal cases. |
| 1:35.0 | How do you prove that the former President mishandled classified information |
| 1:41.0 | without presenting a lot of classified information in open court, |
... |
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