Here Are His False And Misleading Claims After Arrest In Classified Docs Case

Topline

Hours after becoming the first former U.S. president to be charged with a federal crime Tuesday, Donald Trump laid out his defense against the 37-count indictment accusing him of mishandling sensitive government information and obstructing the investigation into his conduct—but his speech included legally fraught arguments and misleading comparisons of his political adversaries’ own legal woes:

Former President Donald Trump speaks at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., Tuesday, June … [+] 13, 2023, after pleading not guilty in a Miami courtroom earlier in the day to dozens of felony counts that he hoarded classified documents and refused government demands to give them back. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Key Facts

President Joe Biden had him arrested on “fake and fabricated charges”: There’s no evidence Biden, who oversees the Justice Department, played any role in Trump’s case—the president has denied involvement, and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to handle the case in order to avoid any perception of political interference.

The Espionage Act doesn’t apply: Trump said the statute is reserved for “traitors and spies,” and while it’s true that espionage refers to spying, the provision Trump was charged under prohibits willful retention of national defense information and has been used to prosecute about a dozen others accused of holding on to classified information over the past five years, the New York Times reported.

The Presidential Records Act gave Trump “sole discretion” to “segregate personal materials”: The National Records and Archives Administration, which takes possession of government documents after elected officials leave office, has disputed this claim, explaining that the law, not the president, defines which documents are personal and which ones are government property, including any records “relating to the constitutional, statutory or other official or ceremonial duties of the president,” former Archives director of litigation Jason Baron told CBS News.

Trump may not have known the records were mixed among personal belongings: Trump said “I hadn’t had a chance to go through all of the boxes” the classified records were kept in, which prosecutors have also said contained personal belongings, but Trump allegedly admitted on tape in 2021 he possessed a “secret . . . military” document that he did not have the authority to declassify, according to the indictment.

Trump was allowed to negotiate the return of documents with the Archives after leaving office: The Presidential Records Act does not lay out any negotiating process, but instead states that official government records become property of the Archives the moment a president leaves office: “There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through,” the Archives stated said in a recent press release.

The Justice Department is only cracking down on Trump, not Biden: A separate special counsel is still investigating Biden’s handling of records, after Biden lawyers and federal investigators found classified documents at his former D.C. office and Delaware home—but the two cases aren’t identical, as Biden argues he is cooperating with the investigation and returned the documents when he found them, while Trump was charged with obstructing the investigation by skirting a subpoena.

Biden shipped 1,850 boxes of records to the University of Delaware: It’s true Biden donated 1,850 boxes of records dating back to his time in the Senate to the University of Delaware, a common practice for outgoing federal elected officials who are not subject to the Presidential Records Act, however there’s no evidence the boxes contained classified information—the New York Times reported in February the FBI is still completing its review of the records, but so far, none of the boxes appeared to contain classified information.

The DOJ “protected” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: Trump has repeatedly claimed Clinton “deleted and acid-washed” State Department emails found on a private server she and her staffers used, but the FBI determined in 2016 that Clinton did not intentionally delete work-related emails that were not turned over to the State Department, and a subsequent 2018 DOJ Inspector General report found “no evidence” Clinton knew any emails had classified information.

The Bill Clinton “sock drawer” case exonerates Trump: Trump claimed he “had every right to have these documents” because a judge determined tapes of then-President Bill Clinton’s interviews with an author—reportedly stored in Clinton’s White House sock drawer—were essentially personal records that the Archives couldn’t reclassify after he left office, but the Mar-A-Lago documents were allegedly labeled classified and related to national defense information, and some experts told Politifact it’s hard to argue they were personal.

What We Don’t Know

The details of Trump’s allegation that “Biden took a $5 million bribe from Ukraine . . . but the FBI and the Justice Department don’t even want to talk about it.” The accusation stems from the GOP’s latest crusade against Biden and his family’s business dealings, in which Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) alleged in May that an anonymous whistleblower told the FBI Biden and his son Hunter Biden were offered $5 million bribes from a Ukrainian energy company Hunter Biden sat on the board of, Burisma. However the Oversight Committee’s investigation is still underway and the specific details of the allegation have yet to be made public. The FBI was reportedly made aware of the allegation in mid-2020 and has not filed charges related to the claim, nor has it publicly announced an investigation or verified the complaint’s legitimacy.

Key Background

Trump gave the speech from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club hours after pleading not guilty in a Miami federal court to 37 counts of mishandling classified documents and obstructing the Justice Department’s investigation into his conduct. Trump broadly claimed during the speech the Justice Department has unfairly targeted him in order to help Biden win re-election and cast the investigation as an attack on his MAGA base, while vowing to “totally obliterate the deep state” if he’s re-elected. The speech followed a similar playbook following his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court in April, when he immediately sent out fundraising emails and delivered remarks later that night in which he blasted the U.S. criminal justice system and claimed it had been hijacked by the left.

Surprising Fact

Trump bashed Smith as a “deranged lunatic” and “Trump hater” in his speech Tuesday, hours after facing him for the first time in court. During the hearing, Smith pointedly glared at Trump for the duration of the 50-minute hearing, CBS and the Guardian reported. Trump, meanwhile, sat between his lawyers, taking notes and crossing his arms, with a solemn look on his face.

Tangent

Publicly, Trump has displayed bravado and defiance in response to the various criminal investigations against him, but privately, he is reportedly nervous about the federal charges he faces, which carry sentences ranging from five to 20 years in prison. Trump alluded to his disappointment in his speech Tuesday, which fell a day before his 77th birthday, telling the crowd “I was with [my son] Eric and [his wife] Laura and the kids [who were saying] ‘happy birthday grandpa.’ Oh nice, oh great, I just got charged with—they want 400 years approximately if you add them all up,” adding, sarcastically, “it’s a wonderful birthday.” Trump also told Politico over the weekend that he doesn’t “care that [his] poll numbers went up” following his Manhattan indictment. “I don’t want to be indicted. I’ve never been indicted,” he said in an apparent reference to the many probes into his business practices over the years.