MSNBC national security analyst Frank Figliuzzi said Friday on “Ana Cabrera Reports” that former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party will incite violence if they continue to say the indictment of the former president is unfair.
Cabrera asked, “When we’re talking about the seriousness of these crimes, I think there may be some misunderstanding out there that Trump just kept the documents and forgot to return them, but now we know that the Espionage Act is involved here. To what degree does that raise the bar?”
Figliuzzi said, “Yeah this is an important issue, in part from a security perspective, Ana, because everybody out there in Trump world is keying off of GOP high profile people. Senators Hawley, Senator Tuberville, Speaker McCarthy and all of the Fox News hosts saying this is nonsense, this is targeted, this is unfair. Yet as you said, we’ve got potentially a number of very serious charges here. I think the more exposure this indictment gets, the sooner we get it out publicly, there’s a greater chance that people will hit the pause button on saying that this is unfair because the facts, I think, are going to speak for themselves.”
He added, “I also think it’s important to not get caught up in this word ‘espionage’ because, look, what we’ve heard so far is that this could be a subsection of one of the espionage statutes that involves simply willfully retaining national defense information. It doesn’t mean he gave this over to a foreign adversary, it doesn’t mean he intended to harm the United States, but it certainly means, if this is the charge we’re talking about, that he absolutely knew he shouldn’t have these documents and he continued to retain them. The obstruction charge, equally very serious, conspiracy. Who did he conspire with and are they cooperating? As Joyce said, all of this goes towards this risk-and-threat picture that the FBI, the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals are going to be assessing, because if indeed GOP high-profile people keep claiming, Trump keeps claiming ‘Unfair, fight back, we’ve lost our democracy,’ all things being said, right, we’re going to see people incited to violence if this doesn’t change.”
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