In an order issued by Judge Aileen Cannon in the federal documents case against Donald Trump instructed the lawyers for each side to submit proposed jury instructions for the 32 various counts Donald Trump faces, but proposed two very different scenarios for the issue of Trump’s “unauthorized possession” of the documents.
After putting forth a scenario in which a jury can review documents to determine if they are, in fact, the individual’s personal records and not government records, Cannon then proposes a second option that would allow the President–Trump, in this case–the authority to declare any government information or documents to be his personal record: “A president has sole authority under the PRA to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency. Neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such a categorization decision. Although there is no formal means in the PRA by which a president is to make that categorization, an outgoing president’s decision to exclude what he/she considers to be personal records from presidential records transmitted to the National Archives and Records Administration constitutes a president’s categorization of those records as personal under the PRA.”
Essentially, she’s asking the lawyers to put together jury instructions in which the President gets sole authority to determine what records produced by the entire government and military of the United States are his personal records, and that decision cannot be reversed or reviewed by anyone, not even the courts or other government agencies. In Cannon’s scenario, if Trump wanted to say the schematics of the new Ford-class aircraft carrier were his, and he could give them to, say, Putin for his birthday, he could.