His comments at the rally yesterday about the former presidents was even more off the wall than usual.
Daniel Dale of CNN:
This is a dishonest claim. The truth: *the National Archives* sorted Bush docs for his library in a heavily secured facility (patrols, cameras, sensors) that happened to be a former alley/restaurant. As with Obama docs the Archives took to Chicago, Bush didn’t take them himself.
Here’s a 1994 article about the Archives’ work with Bush documents in the secure facility that happened to be a former bowling alley/restaurant. Trump made it sound like Bush himself had carelessly taken docs to an alley/restaurant.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-06-26-mn-8638-story.html
And here’s a 1993 WaPo article about NARA using a former alley to temporarily house Bush documents. No equivalence between “NARA takes docs to NARA facility that used to be something else” and “Trump takes docs to his home and won’t give them back to NARA”
One more: a senior official at the Bush library said in February that, in the 1990s, NARA built a secure space to house classified documents within the larger warehouse that used to be an alley.
https://people.com/politics/secrets-from-presidential-papers-direct-from-an-archivist/
Originally tweeted by Daniel Dale (@ddale8) on October 10, 2022.
Importantly, the archives knew what every document was and catalogued it before it went anywhere. Nobody knew what Trump had taken. In fact, they still don’t.