Maggie Haberman: Trump indictment is ‘most devastating...that I have ever read’
New York Times reporter and longtime Donald Trump chronicler Maggie Haberman said Sunday that the indictment against the former president was "one of the most devastating indictments that I have ever read."
Haberman said the details included in the document spell out Trump's personality "to a T."
“It's all aspects of his personality, thinking that he can talk his way out of everything, thinking that things are — and, again, these are allegations. He is entitled to a presumption of innocence. But these are based on insider accounts, his lawyer, an audio recording of him. And it's him boasting; it is him having a disregard for certain rules,” Haberman said as part of a panel on ABC "This Week."
“It is him believing he can talk his way out of almost anything. And I think that it is one of the most devastating indictments that I have ever read,” she said.
Haberman reported in the New York Times possible reasons why Trump may have kept the documents and refused to give them back, noting that his intentions were not detailed in the indictment but that it was not necessary in order to bring a case against him.
"And that's not addressed and doesn't have to be, legally, in the indictment. But it is going to be an enduring question. And it may be one that prosecutors try to deal with at trial. There's obviously been a range of question about this. Trump used everything as leverage. Was he in some way trying to monetize it?" Haberman said Sunday.
"We know that prosecutors went down the road of was he trying to use this for business deals? None of that is there," she added.
Trump was indicted last week on 37 counts as part of the probe, led by special counsel Jack Smith, into Trump’s document handling and whether the former president complied with government requests for records to be returned after the end of his presidency.
Haberman, the author of "Confidence Man" who has covered the former president extensively, had previously said that a reported audio recording of Trump discussing a classified document he took from the White House was “very meaningful” and “a big deal" amid signals that Smith's probe was intensifying.