Latest bombshell in Trump document scandal leaves NY Times reporter at a loss for words

According to a recent report from The New York Times, the National Archives ratcheted up its pressure on former President Donald Trump to return documents he'd taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

"Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims," The Times' report stated. "In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla."

Speaking to MSNBC this Monday, the report's co-author Michael Schmidt said that the notion of Trump using classified documents as a negotiating tool with the National Archives "is just another example of how Trump has sort of approached all of these investigations."

"He was entertaining outlandish ideas -- ideas that were not based in typical reality of what you can and cannot do," Schmidt said. "The idea that if you had materials that were government records and you could use them as a bargaining chip -- with Trump you run out of adjectives, and the best one we could come up with is 'outlandish.'"

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"But in the story, what we do is we chronicle that not only did [his behavior] fit a pattern about the previous investigation, like the Russia investigation where he entertains crazy thoughts, but he also, he misled his own aides, he pushed them to take actions that he was unwilling to take himself, and that in turn exposed the aides and the lawyers and the representatives that were working for him, that increased their own legal exposure. And with Trump, it is a story that time and time again repeats itself."

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