EXCLUSIVE — A little-known Obama administration directive intended to shield the White House from foreign cyberattacks “may be relevant” to former President Donald Trump‘s liability in his criminal classified documents case, according to a Freedom of Information Act request from a conservative legal group.
American First Legal, a nonprofit group headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, shared exclusively with the Washington Examiner its six-page FOIA request seeking to understand more about a “secretive” information technology committee created by former President Barack Obama after a fall 2014 foreign cyberattack breached an unclassified network that serves the Executive Office of the President.
Between reports of two separate hackings believed to be tied to the Russian government in late 2014 and spring 2015, Obama created, via executive action, a White House information technology director and an Executive Committee for Presidential Information Technology.
Obama’s March 2015 PITC memorandum established the president’s “exclusive control” over information resources provided to the president, the vice president, and the EOP. Moreover, it made clear that any records sent to EOP systems or records stemming from those systems are controlled by the president.
“Because of President Obama’s executive action, President Trump could reasonably have concluded that all information provided to him in office was within his exclusive control,” according to AFL’s letter to the FOIA Requester Service Center, which referenced the classified documents case led by special counsel Jack Smith.
In June, Trump pleaded not guilty to a 37-count indictment tied to the way he handled classified materials after prosecutors alleged he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents, some containing classified information, and attempted to obstruct the government’s efforts to retrieve the records.
In late July, a grand jury returned a superseding indictment containing additional documents-related charges and two other co-defendants, weeks after ABC News obtained an audio recording of Trump in which he appeared to tell visitors at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club about a sensitive document that he could no longer declassify because he wasn’t a sitting president.
Smith’s indictment against Trump states the former president “was not authorized to possess or retain those classified documents” that were found by federal authorities at his Florida residence after he left office in January 2021.
“But Obama’s PITC memo may have created a reasonable belief in President Trump that he, infact, had such authority,” according to an AFL press release. “Additionally, if the records Trump allegedly destroyed are still preserved within the EOP or the U.S. Department of Defense as part of PITC-created information systems, then other claims in the indictment may be baseless.”
According to a five-page filing in a 2018 FOIA lawsuit known as Cause of Action Institute v. U.S. Department of the Army, an official handling the group’s request conceded that the software the EOP uses is located within the Department of Defense, which, under the PITC memo, would be subject to presidential control.
AFL presumes that the DoD servers did store information but filed its FOIA request to learn what information the Pentagon stored, as well as if the information stored on the PITC network formed the basis for Smith’s prosecution of Trump. If it did, “that evidence should have been disclosed to the former President and may be relevant to his liability,” according to the release.
Daniel Epstein, a lawyer at AFL, said he believes the request is a matter to be looked into by both Smith and Robert Hur, the special counsel overseeing President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents during his vice presidential tenure.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“And then we needed to determine: Does PITC affect the intent of any of the targets of the investigation in the case of Trump, a post-indictment criminal defendant?” Epstein said.
Trump’s legal team in December filed a motion saying Smith should be forced to share which classified information he wishes to redact because the justice system broadly disfavors filings that are not shown to defense counsel and because his attorneys have obtained the necessary clearances to view the records.