The latest on Trump’s historic federal indictment
Former President Donald Trump made numerous false and misleading claims in a speech he delivered Tuesday night following his afternoon arraignment in Miami federal court to face charges of illegally retaining classified documents and obstructing the federal investigation into his conduct.
“Today we witnessed the most evil and heinous abuse of power in the history of our country,” Trump said to a crowd of supporters, slamming the administration of President Joe Biden.
Trump, who pleaded not guilty, has been persistently dishonest about matters related to the indictment. Here is a fact check of some of the things he said in the Tuesday night address from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Trump and the Presidential Records Act
Trump claimed that the documents he had at Mar-a-Lago were “his own documents” and that he “had every right” to keep them under the Presidential Records Act.
Facts First: This is false. The Presidential Records Act says that all presidential records belong to the federal government the moment the president leaves office. By having official records at Mar-a-Lago after his presidency, Trump was in clear contravention of that law.
The key sentence from the Presidential Records Act is unequivocal: “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”
Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, said in a Sunday email: “Under the Presidential Records Act, not a single document pertaining to the official business of the White House – classified or unclassified – should have been carted off to Mar-A-Lago. President Trump might consider such records to be ‘his,’ but they are not.”
Biden’s Senate records at the University of Delaware
As Trump has done repeatedly, he attacked Biden’s handling of official documents. He claimed that Biden took classified documents from his time as a senator and vice president – and then claimed, without explanation, that Biden “sent 1,850 boxes to the University of Delaware.”
Facts First: Trump’s context-free invocation of these Biden documents is highly misleading. The approximately 1,850 boxes that Biden legally and properly donated in 2012 to the University of Delaware are a collection of records from his 36 years in the US Senate. Unlike presidents, whose official records are property of the federal government under the Presidential Records Act, senators own their offices’ records and can do whatever they want with them – donate them to colleges as is standard, keep them at their homes, give them to journalists, even throw them in the trash. There is no current evidence that these boxes of Biden documents contain any classified documents.
Biden consented to two FBI searches at the university that did not initially appear to turn up any documents with classified markings, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN’s Paula Reid in February, though the papers were still being analyzed at the time.
Biden’s handling of classified documents is certainly open to criticism. Classified documents were discovered at his home in Delaware and in a former office of his, and he remains under a special counsel investigation. But there is nothing nefarious about him donating his Senate records to his alma mater.
Margaret Kwoka, a law professor at The Ohio State University and an expert on information law, said in a Friday email that “any comparison between congressional records and presidential records is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The legal requirements are entirely different between the two.”
You can read a longer fact check here about the repository of Biden’s Senate documents at the University of Delaware.
