Can Donald Trump Slither His Way Out Of Potential Prison Time? A Look Back At Andrew Weissmann's Prediction

After Former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate was raided by the FBI in August of last year, Andrew Weissmann, a former top prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller, said he believed Trump’s statements that he made while campaigning for fellow GOP candidates in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms could become Trump’s undoing.

Now, with the findings of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the 45th president expected to be announced after Memorial Day — and potentially leading to charges that could carry a 33-year prison sentence upon conviction — the American public will find out whether Trump’s public statements were the axe in his proverbial coffin.

Three crimes Trump could potentially be charged with were outlined in a search warrant last year on which Weissmann based his comments. Those crimes are obstruction of justice, Espionage Act violations and improper handling of government documents.

What Weissmann Said Last October: Weissman based his prediction that Trump may find it difficult to squirm his way out of the three charges on remarks Trump made last October at a weekend rally in Mesa, Arizona, which the former prosecutor said could come back to haunt him.

"They should give me immediately back everything that they've taken from me because it's mine, it's mine. They took it from me — in the raid. They broke into my house," Trump said during the rally. “I had a small number of boxes in storage,” the former president continued.

"The trick is always how do you show that somebody like Donald Trump knew what was at Mar-a-Lago, and it wasn’t just his lawyers or underlings who knew the details," Weissmann said, according to a report from the Washington Examiner. On Trump’s admission to owning the documents, Weissmann added: “those are incredibly damning statements that go directly to knowledge and intent.”

The FBI raided Trump’s Florida estate on Aug. 8, and in September information on the documents the government seized during the raid started to leak. Documents containing the military capabilities of foreign countries, including nuclear information, were confiscated along with highly classified information on U.S. operations. Over 300 documents had reportedly been seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago by that time.

"You can be sure that the DOJ prosecutors are doing what I’m doing, which is listening to this, going, this is making it that much easier to prove the only element that it could pose any real difficulty for the Department of Justice in bringing a case involving the Mar-a-Lago documents," Weissmann said.

What's More: Weissmann also referenced reporting by New York Times journalists Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman as proof of Trump’s knowledge of the documents.

In her new book “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” Haberman reported, among many other things, that Trump had a stark disregard for national security and the government’s designation of sensitive information.

"I look at this with my former prosecutor’s hat on, and the reporting from Mike and Maggie Haberman and the speech that you talked about that he gave over the weekend are really damning evidence because the typical defense for somebody like Donald Trump is what a CEO argues, which is 'I didn’t know the details, I don’t have the knowledge or intent to have violated the law,'" Weissmann said during an appearance on MSNBC last year.

See Also: Is Public Tough Guy Donald Trump Scared Of Jail? A Look Back At When The President Feared Death

Some elements of this story were previously reported by Benzinga and it has been updated. 

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