Michael Cohen says Trump believed the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago were his 'get out of jail free card'

 

Joshua Zitser

Oct. 9,022

 

 Michael Cohen said that former President Donald Trump saw the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago as his "get out of jail free" card, he told Salon magazine in an interview.

"He's only interested in one thing: the get out of jail free card," Cohen said. "And that's exactly what he saw in those documents."

Cohen, once Trump's personal attorney and fixer, suggested in the Salon interview that Trump thought he might be able to leverage the confidentiality of these documents to his own advantage.

-----

The Washington Post reported that FBI agents were looking for secret documents about nuclear weapons during the Mar-a-Lago raid in August. The Post's source did not say if this refers to the US arsenal or that of another country.

-----

According to The New York Times, Trump has already floated the idea of using classified documents as a bargaining chip. Trump last year suggested to advisors that he would return boxes of materials from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives and Records Administration in exchange for  "sensitive" documents about the FBI investigation of his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia, the paper said.

Aides to the former president did not go through with the proposal, per The Times.

-----