Fact-checker shreds Trump's newest excuse for stashing classified documents

On Monday, FactCheck.org deconstructed a particular claim from former President Donald Trump — that other presidents had stashes of government documents comparable to the one the FBI raided his home in Mar-a-Lago to seize — and revealed it to be completely false.

"Trump accused several of his presidential predecessors of storing White House documents, including ones that were classified, in unsecured warehouse spaces," wrote Robert Farley and Lori Robertson. "For example, Trump said, 'George H.W. Bush took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant, they put them together. And it had a broken front door and broken windows. Other than that it was quite secure. And there was no security.'"

This prompted a tweet from Jeb Bush, who replied, “I am so confused. My dad enjoyed a good Chinese meal and enjoyed the challenge of 7-10 split. What the heck is up with you?”

The problem with Trump's claim, is that "all of the examples Trump mentioned were cases of the National Archives and Records Administration — not the former presidents themselves — storing documents in secure facilities, while permanent presidential libraries were being built." For example, in the case of Bush, "none of the presidential records, including classified documents, were in Bush’s possession or in his personal residence," and the former bowling alley was specifically retrofitted as a storage space to securely hold classified material.

Trump also claimed former President Barack Obama “moved more than 20 truckloads, over 33 million pages of documents, both classified and unclassified, to a poorly built and totally unsafe former furniture store located in a rather bad neighborhood in Chicago.” In fact, NARA moved those documents, not Obama. "Trump also misleadingly claimed that President George W. Bush 'stored 68 million pages in a warehouse in Texas,' and that Bill Clinton 'took millions of documents from the White House to a former car dealership in Arkansas.' In both cases, NARA controlled the documents at temporary facilities (a warehouse in Bush’s case and a former car dealership in Clinton’s case) before the presidential libraries were constructed."

These false claims are concurrent with the former president's long-running claims that the FBI may have "planted" some of the classified documents — for which he has provided no evidence — and that they were "his" documents that he had a right to take. He has also claimed he secretly declassified these documents just by thinking about them. Trump's lawyers have made none of these arguments in court.

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"'When will they investigate and prosecute Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, and look into what took place with George Bush’s father, and the warehouse of documents had by Barack Hussein Obama?' Trump concluded. 'And I don’t think they’ll do it. And you know what, I don’t think they should do it,'" the fact check concluded. "But examples of presidential records being stored by NARA in secured, temporary facilities are not equivalent to the facts surrounding Trump’s case, and not evidence of potential wrongdoing that would result in the kind of criminal investigation that Trump now faces."

You can read more here.