As Donald Trump stares down a damning indictment over his mishandling of classified documents, a common refrain is that the former president has no one to blame but himself. Throughout the entire process, Trump rebuffed the government’s requests to return the documents stored at his golf clubs in both Florida and New Jersey. That refusal prompted the infamous raid of Mar-a-Lago and a public spectacle that now includes photographs of documents stacked ceiling high in a bathroom.
However, a new report claims that Trump dug his own hole even deeper thanks to taking the advice of some guy who’s not even a lawyer. According to The Washington Post, Trump’s legal team attempted to broker a settlement with Attorney General Merrick Garland that could’ve avoided the prosecution of a former president. Hell-bent on keeping his “boxes,” Trump reportedly rebuffed legal advice and opted to battle it out with the Department of Justice due to the advice of a right-wing activist with no legal training:
Trump time and again rejected the advice from lawyers and advisers who urged him to cooperate and instead took the advice of Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch, and a range of others who told him he could legally keep the documents and should fight the Justice Department, advisers said. Trump would often cite Fitton to others, and Fitton told some of Trump’s lawyers that Trump could keep the documents, even as they disagreed, the advisers said.
The Post reports that several of Trump’s advisors blame Fitton for filling the former president’s head with false hopes of keeping his “boxes,” which put Trump in the crosshairs of one indictment and possibly another in New Jersey.
(Via The Washington Post)