Former President Donald Trump has responded to the FBI's seizure of top-secret government documents at Mar-a-Lago by throwing out a number of statements that bear little to no relation to the truth.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale documents, Trump and his allies have made a "dizzying flurry of defenses" for the former president's decision to keep top-secret documents stashed at his private resort, and many of them are simply false or highly misleading.
First, Dale takes apart the notion that Trump issued a broad declassification order for all of the Mar-a-Lago documents, as there is not even a hint of a paper trail that would corroborate such a claim and most legal experts don't believe presidents can declassify documents simply by wiggling their fingers.
Dale also challenges Trump's claim that there was no need for the FBI to execute a search warrant on his property because he'd already been fully cooperating with their investigation.
"By the time of the search, the federal government had been asking Trump for more than a year to return records from his presidency," notes Dale. "Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May and served Trump's team with the subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trump's team returned only some of these documents -- and then, in June, Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document certifying on behalf of Trump's office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true."
Dale also takes a hatchet to baseless assertions about the FBI potentially "planting" evidence against the twice-impeached former president.
"There is zero evidence that the FBI planted anything at Mar-a-Lago," he writes. "And it is routine, not suspicious, for searches to be conducted without witnesses such as lawyers being in the room; lawyers don't have a right to watch."
Read the full analysis at this link.
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