“I have been saying all along I thought the obstruction was going to be the Big Kahuna here in the sense that what we understood about the facts was that they had issued former President Trump a grand jury subpoena and they had caused, or he had caused, according to the theory, his lawyers to give false information to the FBI to be transmitted to the grand jury about whether he had turned over all the stuff in his possession,” McCarthy said.

“What I’m struck by reading the indictment now, first of all, it’s very detailed, it’s a narrative indictment, it’s not a bare bones thing where they’re just talking about the statutory offenses. And the first almost three dozen counts in this indictment are related specifically to classified documents. That is, you know, to the extent that we were led to believe that there might be one or two classified documents counts, in fact there are over 30, and what they’ve done, I think, is taken the most sensitive of the documents and charged them as separate counts.” …

“On the political plain, I’ve personally never been blown away by his claim, which his lawyers won’t repeat in court, and which there’s no documentary evidence of that he declassified everything. Because declassification, even if he did it, let’s assume for argument sake that he did, even though there’s no real evidence of it, it wouldn’t be a defense in an Espionage Act case because the Espionage Act doesn’t speak about classified information — it speaks about national defense information. So even if he declassified everything, if he’s mishandling national defense information, it wouldn’t matter that he had declassified it. And of course with respect to obstruction, they gave him a subpoena.”

[I made this same point in my earlier main-blog post on Jonathan Turley’s assessment of the indictment. 18 USC 793 doesn’t even mention a word about classification. But even if it did, the recorded conversation in the indictment has Trump himself admitting that the material was still classified. — Ed]