Former President Donald Trump claimed in a recent interview on Fox News that he was under no need to turn over any federal records he had after leaving office. He is presently being prosecuted on federal offenses in Florida for knowingly concealing secret information and impeding the government’s attempts to get it.
He has entered a not guilty plea despite the accusations. During a town hall meeting on Tuesday in Greenville, South Carolina, Trump made these untrue statements.
The former president was questioned by moderator Laura Ingraham over a story that was made public by the Department of Justice, which claimed that Special Counsel Robert Hur had decided not to bring charges against President Joe Biden for keeping official documents after he left the Senate and the vice presidency.
The report noted that lawyers for Biden voluntarily returned the documents after being made aware they were in Biden’s possession. Hur also stated that Biden should not be prosecuted because a jury would likely view him “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Ingraham questioned Trump if he thinks Biden should be prosecuted.
Trump did not answer the question directly and falsely insisted the Presidential Records Act gave him the right to take the documents.
“I was allowed to do what I did,” he said. “Absolutely allowed.”
The host asked why Trump did not just return the documents that were found by FBI agents executing a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022:
INGRAHAM: Why didn’t you just hand them over when they requested them? I mean, they requested them. You could’ve just handed them over, probably save yourself a lot of trouble.
TRUMP: First of all, I didn’t have to hand them over. But second of all, I would’ve done that. We were talking and then all of a sudden they raided Mar-a-Lago.
The National Archives notified Trump’s aides in May 2021 that records from his administration were missing from the organization. Following months of back and forth, Trump’s staff informed the Archives that boxes of records were prepared for retrieval, which the organization duly accomplished in January 2022.
But other records that were still in Trump’s hands were known to the Archives. Trump willingly gave the Department of Justice permission to tour the estate in June of that year, and his lawyer Christina Bobb signed a statement to the DOJ declaring that, as far as she knew, there was no government property left at Mar-a-Lago.
