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Former President Donald Trump and his representatives have offered up a dizzying flurry of defenses in the wake of the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in early August \u2014 and some of their claims are false, uncorroborated or sharply disputed.<\/p>\n
Here is a look at the facts, as we know them today, around five of the public arguments Trump and his team have made in the wake of the search.<\/p>\n
The claim: Trump declassified everything<\/strong><\/p>\n The Justice Department said in a court filing this week that the search of Mar-a-Lago resulted in the seizure of more than 100 unique documents with classification markings. But in posts on his social media platform, Trump has argued that he had declassified all of the documents in his possession.<\/p>\n \u201cNumber one, it was all declassified,\u201d he wrote in a post on August 12. \u201cLucky I Declassified!\u201d he wrote in a post this Wednesday.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s comments about this supposed 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 a Fox appearance on August 12. Solomon read a statement, which he said was from Trump\u2019s office, claiming that Trump \u201chad a standing order\u2026that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.\u201d<\/p>\n Facts First<\/strong><\/p>\n Trump and his team have not provided any proof that Trump actually conducted some sort of broad declassification of the documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago \u2014 and, so far, his lawyers notably have not argued in their court filings that Trump did so. Eighteen former top 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 standing Trump declassification order when they were serving in the administration and that they now believe the claim is false. The former officials used words like \u201cludicrous,\u201d \u201cridiculous\u201d and \u201cbullsh*t.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTotal nonsense,\u201d said one person who served as a senior White House official. \u201cIf that\u2019s true, where is the order with his signature on it? If that were the case, there would have been tremendous pushback from the Intel Community and DoD, which would almost certainly have become known to Intel and Armed Services Committees on the Hill.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to note that the laws under which the Justice Department is now investigating possible crimes \u2014 statutes about the willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of a federal investigation, and the concealment or removal of government records \u2014 do not require documents to be classified for a crime to have been committed. (A grand jury subpoena in May and the search warrant in August both sought documents with \u201cclassification markings,\u201d not specifically documents that are currently classified.) Also, there would be major questions about the legal validity of any broad \u201cstanding order\u201d to automatically declassify any document Trump carried out of a certain room.<\/p>\n But first things first:<\/strong> Trump has shown no corroboration for the claim that he did issue such an order.<\/p>\n The Justice Department said in the court filing this week that Trump\u2019s representatives never asserted that documents had been declassified either when they voluntarily turned over 15 boxes that included 184 unique documents with classification markings in January (after an extended back-and-forth with NARA) or when responding to the grand jury subpoena in June, when they returned another package of documents that included 38 additional unique documents with classification markings.<\/p>\n The claim: The feds could\u2019ve just asked for the documents<\/strong><\/p>\n Trump has argued that the search was unnecessary because the federal investigators could have simply asked for the documents from his team, which he claimed had been fully cooperative.<\/p>\n \u201cThey could have had it anytime they wanted\u2014and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK,\u201d Trump posted on his social media platform on August 12.<\/p>\n Facts First<\/strong><\/p>\n It is not true that federal investigators could have long ago obtained the government records in Trump\u2019s possession just by asking. By the time of the search, the federal government had been asking Trump for more than a year to return records from his presidency. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May and served Trump\u2019s team with the subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trump\u2019s team returned only some of these documents \u2014 and then, in June, Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document certifying on behalf of Trump\u2019s office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true.<\/p>\n In other words: Trump claimed that the Justice Department could have just asked for the documents \u201cLONG ago\u201d even though his team explicitly and inaccurately told the department in June that there were no documents left to ask for. Relatedly, the department has called into question how cooperative Trump\u2019s team was.<\/p>\n In its court filing this week, the department asserted that investigators \u201cdeveloped evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room\u201d at Mar-a-Lago \u201cand that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government\u2019s investigation.\u201d They said of the August search: \u201cThat the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the \u2018diligent search\u2019 that the former President\u2019s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.\u201d A member of Trump\u2019s team has tried to pin blame on the General Services Administration, a federal agency that provides transition office space and assistance services to the outgoing president.<\/p>\n Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official whom Trump named as another representative to NARA, said on Fox on August 12 on that \u201cthe GSA has since come out, the Government (sic) Services Administration, and said they mistakenly packed some boxes and moved them to Mar-a-Lago. That\u2019s not on the President. That\u2019s on the National Archives to sort that material out.\u201d Patel said that even if material was classified, which is \u201chighly unlikely,\u201d the fact that the GSA boxed the material \u201cshould have been the end\u201d of the matter.<\/p>\n Facts First<\/strong><\/p>\n The GSA has repeatedly rejected Patel\u2019s claim. The agency says it had no role in deciding which documents from Trump\u2019s outgoing transition office in Virginia would be placed in boxes or which boxes would be shipped to Mar-a-Lago \u2014 and that these decisions were made by Trump\u2019s team alone.<\/p>\n A GSA spokesperson said in a statement last week that it was Trump\u2019s team, not the GSA, that packed the boxes and that it was Trump\u2019s team, not the GSA, that put these boxes on pallets and shrink-wrapped them for shipping from Trump\u2019s transition office in Virginia. GSA did enter into a support contract for the actual September 2021 shipping, but \u201cnot for the packing of the boxes,\u201d the spokesperson said \u2014 and \u201cGSA did not examine the contents of the boxes and, accordingly, had no knowledge of the contents prior to shipping.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not clear 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 taken to Mar-a-Lago at other times and in other ways.<\/p>\n The claim: The FBI may have planted evidence<\/strong><\/p>\n Trump lawyer Alina Habba said on Fox on August 9: \u201cI\u2019m concerned that they may have planted something; you know, at this point, who knows?\u201d The next day, Trump suggested on social media that it was shady that the FBI would not allow witnesses, such as his lawyers, to be in the rooms being searched and \u201csee what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, \u2018planting.’\u201d<\/p>\n Facts First<\/strong><\/p>\n There is zero evidence that the FBI planted anything at Mar-a-Lago. And it is routine, not suspicious, for searches to be conducted without witnesses such as lawyers being in the room; lawyers don\u2019t have a right to watch. The claim: Obama took tens of millions of documents<\/strong><\/p>\n The week of the search, Trump turned to a familiar tactic under pressure: confuse the public by making false claims about former President Barack Obama. Trump asserted that Obama had taken tens of millions of documents to Chicago, Obama\u2019s adopted hometown and the location of his future library and museum.<\/p>\n In a social media post on August 11, Trump wrote, \u201cWhat happened to the 30 million pages of documents taken from the White House to Chicago by Barack Hussein Obama? He refused to give them back! What is going on? This act was strongly at odds with NARA. Will they be breaking into Obama\u2019s \u2018mansion\u2019 in Martha\u2019s Vineyard?\u201d In another statement on August 12, Trump claimed: \u201cPresident Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified.\u201d<\/p>\n
The claim: It was the bureaucrats\u2019 fault<\/p>\n
The claim about possible \u201cplanting\u201d is impossible to definitively debunk at this point. Once more, though, Trump and his allies have not shown even a hint of proof that it is true.<\/p>\n