Here’s a look at the facts, as we know them today, around five of the public arguments Trump and his team have made following the search.
The Justice Department said in a court filing this week that the Mar-a-Lago search resulted in the seizure of more than 100 unique documents with classification marks. But in posts on his social media platform, Trump has argued that he had declassified all the documents he had. “Number one, it was all declassified,” he wrote in an Aug. 12 post. “Lucky I declassified!” he wrote in a post on Wednesday. Trump’s comments on this alleged declassification have been very vague. But conservative writer John Solomon, one of the people Trump named as a representative in his dealings with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), was more specific in an Aug. 12 Fox appearance. Solomon read a statement, which he said was from Trump’s office, stating that Trump “had a standing order … that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were considered declassified at the time what withdrew them.” First facts: Trump and his team have not provided any evidence that Trump actually conducted any kind of broad declassification of the documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago, and so far his lawyers have not argued in their court documents that Trump did it. Eighteen former senior Trump administration officials, including two former White House chiefs of staff who spoke on the record, told CNN in August that they never heard of a permanent declassification order from Trump when they served in the administration and now believe the claim is false. Former officials used words like “ridiculous,” “ridiculous” and “bullsh*t.”
“Total nonsense,” said one person who served as a senior White House official. “If that is true, where is the order with his signature? If that were the case, there would have been a huge pushback from the Intel community and the DoD, who almost certainly would have known Intel and the committees of armed services of the hill.”
It is important to note that the laws under which the Justice Department is now investigating possible crimes—statutes on the willful withholding of national defense information, obstruction of a federal investigation, and the concealment or deletion of government records—do not require documents to be charged for having committed a crime. (A grand jury subpoena in May and search warrant in August sought documents with “classification markings,” not specifically documents that are currently classified.) Moreover, there would be significant questions about the legal validity of any broad “standing order” to automatically declassify any document Trump has made from a certain room.
But first things first: Trump has shown no confirmation of the claim that he issued such an order.
The Justice Department said in a court filing this week that Trump representatives never claimed the documents had been declassified when they voluntarily turned over 15 boxes containing 184 unique documents with classification marks in January (after an expanded back and forth with NARA). or when they responded to the grand jury subpoena in June, when they returned another package of documents that included an additional 38 unique documents with classification marks.
— CNN’s Jamie Gangel, Elizabeth Stuart and Jeremy Herb contributed to this article.
The claim: The feds could have asked for the documents
Trump has argued that the search was unnecessary because federal investigators could have simply asked his team, which he said had been fully cooperative, for the documents. TO DO WAS TO ASK,” Trump posted on his social media platform on August 12. Facts first: It is not true that federal investigators could have long ago obtained government records held by Trump just by asking for them. At the time of the search, the federal government had been asking Trump to turn over his presidential records for more than a year.Even when the Justice Department went further in May and handed over the Trump’s team subpoenaed for the return of all classified documents, the Trump team only returned some of those documents, and then in June, Trump’s lawyer, Christina Bobb, signed a document. certify on behalf of Trump’s office that all the documents had been returned, even though this was not true.
Put another way: Trump claimed the Justice Department could have requested the documents “A LONG TIME AGO” even though his team explicitly and imprecisely told the department in June that there were no documents left to request. Relatedly, the department has questioned how cooperative Trump’s team was.
In its court filing this week, the department said investigators “developed evidence that government records were likely hidden and removed from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago” and that efforts were likely made to obstruct the government investigation.” Of the August search they said: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many classified documents as the ‘diligent search’ that the former president’s lawyer and other representatives have weeks to carry out serious matters of representations. made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”
The claim: It was the bureaucrats’ fault
A member of Trump’s team has tried to blame the General Services Administration, a federal agency that provides transitional office space and support services to the outgoing president. Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official whom Trump named as another NARA representative, said. on Fox on Aug. 12 that “GSA, the Government Services Administration (sic), has since come out and said they packed some boxes by mistake and moved them to Mar-a-Lago . This is not the president’s. This is the National Archives to order this material.” Patel said that even if the material was classified, which is “highly unlikely,” the fact that the GSA seized the material “should have been the end” of the matter. First facts: The GSA has repeatedly rejected Patel’s claim. The agency says it had no role in deciding which documents from Trump’s outgoing transition office in Virginia would be placed in boxes or which boxes would be sent to Mar-a-Lago, and that these decisions were made by Trump’s team alone.
A GSA spokesman said in a statement last week that it was Trump’s team, not the GSA, that packed the boxes and that it was the Trump team, not the GSA, that placed those boxes on pallets and shrink-wrapped them for shipping from the Trump transition. office in Virginia. GSA signed a support contract for the actual September 2021 shipment, but “not for the packaging of the boxes,” the spokesman said, and “GSA did not examine the contents of the boxes and, in consequently, I had no knowledge of the content prior to shipment.”
It is unclear how many of the government documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago were part of the September 2021 shipments from Virginia. It is theoretically possible that some documents were brought to Mar-a-Lago at other times and in other ways.
– CNN’s Kristen Holmes contributed to this article.
The claim: The FBI may have planted evidence
Trump’s attorney Alina Habba told Fox on Aug. 9, “I’m concerned that they planted something — you know, at this point, who knows?” The next day, Trump suggested on social media that it was shady that the FBI wouldn’t allow witnesses, like their lawyers, to be in the rooms being searched and “see what they were doing, taking or hopefully not planting”. ‘” Facts first: There’s no evidence the FBI planted anything at Mar-a-Lago. And it’s common, not suspicious, for searches to be conducted without witnesses like lawyers in the room; lawyers don’t have right to look
The claim about the possible “plantation” is impossible to definitively disprove at this point. Once again, however, Trump and his allies have not shown a shred of evidence that this is true.
The claim: Obama took tens of millions of documents
In the week of the search, Trump resorted to a familiar tactic under pressure: confusing the public by making false claims about former President Barack Obama. Trump claimed that Obama had taken tens of millions of documents to Chicago, Obama’s hometown and the location of his future library and museum. In a social media post on August 11, Trump wrote: “What happened to the 30 million pages of documents taken from the White House in Chicago by Barack Hussein Obama? He refused to give them back ! What’s going on? This act was very much at odds with NARA. Are they going to break into Obama’s ‘mansion’ on Martha’s Vineyard?” In another statement on August 12, Trump claimed: “President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, most of them classified.” statement that makes it clear. The statement explained that all of Obama’s presidential records remain in the “exclusive physical and legal custody” of NARA; that it was NARA, not Obama, who brought some 30 million records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area; that the records he brought to the Chicago-area facility are unclassified; and that Obama’s classified records are in a different facility than NARA. NARA has more information on Obama’s presidential records plan here.
CNN’s Marshall Cohen contributed to this article.