Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
- Marc Short said the documents Trump had taken to Mar-a-Lago were "baffling."
- He also said it appeared Trump's lawyers had lied to the Department of Justice.
- Legal experts and former federal prosecutors have also mocked Trump's legal team.
Marc Short, the former chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, criticized how lawyers for former President Donald Trump have acted in the investigation into documents held at Mar-a-Lago.
During an interview on Fox News' "Media Buzz" on Sunday, host Howard Kurtz mentioned Short had been critical of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and asked him if media coverage of it has been fair.
Instead of commenting on the media, Short explained he thinks the Department of Justice has an "extra burden of transparency in this case" due to the FBI's "politicized" actions related to the Russia investigation and the Steele dossier.
Short, who worked under Pence from 2019 to 2021, then expressed concern over documents held at Mar-a-Lago and pivoted, unprompted, to mock Trump's legal team.
"It's certainly baffling as to why a lot of those documents were at Mar-a-Lago. It doesn't seem like it's the most secure environment," he said. "And I think there's a question about why Trump's lawyers apparently were so misleading, potentially lying, in the affidavit, saying they returned all the information."
"There's a difference between playing a lawyer on TV and actually having good legal counsel, and I think that's one of the challenges they currently face," Short added.
—Acyn (@Acyn) September 11, 2022
Trump's legal team has come under fire in the weeks since the FBI conducted a court-authorized search at his Florida residence and club on August 8. Court records have suggested the lawyers had not been forthcoming with the Department of Justice as it spent more than a year trying to retrieve the documents before conducting the raid.
In June, lawyers for Trump told the Justice Department all classified materials had been returned, the New York Times reported, but the FBI found more during the search. The Times also reported Justice Department officials said they could not trust what Trump's lawyers tell them due to the former president withholding information from them and often changing his mind.
Legal experts and former federal prosecutors have also mocked Trump's legal team.
"They appear to be either completely incompetent or out of their depth," former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti previously told Insider. "That's part of the reason why the former president has trouble finding lawyers: Because he demands that they file documents and take positions that have no legal support whatsoever."
The Times also reported on Saturday that lawyers for Trump often end up facing legal troubles of their own, with some lawyers joking that MAGA stands for "making attorneys get attorneys."
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