Donald Trump issued a new statement about the report that the FBI was searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents related to nuclear weapons, and where his previous statement kind of sort of admitted it by suggesting that the FBI might have planted such information, the new one moves on to suggesting it’s no big deal because everyone else does it, too.
And once you’re trying to downplay the seriousness of the allegation, you’re basically admitting that it’s true.
RELATED STORY: Washington Post: Mar-a-Lago search was about 'classified documents relating to nuclear weapons'
“President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” Trump said in a statement. “How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
And the FBI didn’t raid Obama, despite his suspiciously Muslim middle name, so therefore case closed, this is a witch hunt against Trump.
The claim about Obama and 30 million pages of documents has been aired frequently on Fox News in recent days, and cited by Trump repeatedly, though the nuclear allegation only came up after The Washington Post’s report that that's what prompted the Mar-a-Lago warrant and search. Funny, that.
In reality, Obama and his presidential library worked with the National Archives in a deal to get the documents digitized and make them available online, a deal that did involve moving them physically to Chicago. The digitizing part hasn’t happened yet—for which there is legitimate criticism—but working with the federal agency that legally owns the documents to make them available to the public in a new (for presidential documents) way after appropriate vetting of what documents will be treated this way is a very different thing from carrying away 15 boxes of material, some of it classified, some of it possibly classified and about nuclear weapons, without having first turned it over to the National Archives.
They’re just not comparable, no matter how much Trump and his buddies at Fox News are trying to muddy the water.
But if “Obama did it first” is Trump’s new main argument, then Trump definitely did it, and he knows he’s busted. And if he’s busted for violating the classification of nuclear information, then he’s going to do his best to get the entire Republican Party on board with the message that it’s really not a problem. So we have that to look forward to.
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