Trump’s changing excuses are pathetic
Trump has now had a long list of shifting explanations as to why he had all those government documents stored at his commercial resort. But the bottom line is this:
“What he doesn’t have the right to do is possess the documents; they are not his,” Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives for more than a decade, said. “There should be no presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, whether they are classified or unclassified or subject to executive privilege or subject to attorney-client privilege.”
Documents covered by executive privilege are meant to be kept within the government too. They are not his either. All of his excuses, every last one, are irrelevant.
The New York Times, from which the above excerpt is taken, noted this about the most fatuous excuse of all:
Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official, subsequently justified the handling of the documents by saying that Mr. Trump had declassified them before leaving office — a claim echoed by the former president this week.
In an appearance on Fox News on Friday night, the right-wing writer John Solomon, one of Mr. Trump’s representatives for interacting with the National Archives, read a statement from the former president’s office asserting Mr. Trump had a “standing order” during his presidency that “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”
That claim would not resolve the investigation. Two of the laws referred to in the search warrant executed this week criminalize the taking or concealment of government records, regardless of whether they had anything to do with national security. And laws against taking material with restricted national security information are not dependent on whether the material is technically classified.
Mr. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser over 17 months, said he had never heard of the standing order that Mr. Trump’s office claimed to have in place. It is, he said, “almost certainly a lie.”
“I was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy when I came in,” Mr. Bolton said, adding that he had never been told of it while he was working there, and had never heard of such a thing after. “If he were to say something like that, you would have to memorialize that, so that people would know it existed,” he said.
What’s more, he pointed out, secure facilities for viewing sensitive material were constructed at Mr. Trump’s clubs in Florida and New Jersey, where he often spent weekends as president, meaning that the documents wouldn’t need to be declassified. And if they were declassified, Mr. Bolton said, they would be considered subject to public record requests.
He continued, “When somebody begins to concoct lies like this, it shows a real level of desperation.”
If they are all declassified then they are all subject to FOIA.
Lock him up.