Dan Coats, who served as director of national intelligence under former President Trump, emphasized Thursday that “there are people in prison” for taking classified documents home, after the Justice Department brought new charges against his former boss over his handling of classified materials.
“There are people in prison who have taken stuff home when they knew they shouldn’t have taken it home,” Coats said on CNN. “Maybe it was truly innocent, but it’s so critical that we abide by the rules.”
“We put millions of dollars in technology for gathering intelligence, and if that’s breached because somebody gets a classified document floating around or knows about it, we lose that information that we are grabbing,” he added.
“So, it’s more than just a bunch of papers and what big deal is this and so forth. Lives can be lost. Money can be misspent.”
In a superseding indictment filed Thursday night, the Justice Department accused former President Trump of attempting to delete surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago residence, with the help of his aide Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos de Oliveira.
Along with an additional Espionage Act charge for a military document that Trump boasted of having at a 2021 meeting, the former president is now facing 40 counts in the documents case. He pleaded not guilty to the original 37-count indictment last month.
Trump has maintained that prosecutors are targeting him because of his bid for the White House, describing the new charges Thursday as “election interference at the highest level.”
“This is prosecutorial misconduct used at a level never seen before,” Trump told Fox News Digital. “If I weren’t leading Biden by a lot in numerous polls, and wasn’t going to be the Republican nominee, it wouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t be happening.”
A number of Trump’s critics — inside and outside the GOP — have raised the possibility that he could end up in prison over the various criminal cases he is facing.
GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, said earlier this month that despite his public comments, Trump “goes to bed every night thinking about the sound of that jail cell door closing behind them.”
And George Conway, a conservative attorney and prominent critic of former President Trump, said last month that there is a “substantial possibility” Trump ends up jailed.