New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst
Maggie Haberman has dropped a new scoop: former President
Donald Trump wanted to barter the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago for the FBI’s files on the Trump/Russia investigation.
Haberman has been
making the
rounds to promote the release of
her controversial but much-buzzed-about
book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.
But she has also found time to drop
scoop after
scoop about the
Justice Department’s investigation of Trump for crimes involving the Espionage Act after thousands of documents — some
bearing classified markings — were seized from his home in August.
On Saturday, Haberman and
Michael Schmidt dropped a new one,
reporting that Trump effectively wanted to use the Mar-a-Lago documents as hostages — to procure other secret documents:
Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.
In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.