In a scorching column for the Wall Street Journal, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove dropped the hammer on Donald Trump for putting himself in the position of becoming the first former U.S. president to face federal felony charges that could land him in prison for decades.
Rove, who has been warning Republicans that Trump can't win in 2024 if he is the GOP nominee for president, called out the former president for his "childish impulse to keep mementos from his time in the Oval Office, no matter what the law says."
As the Republican campaign strategist explained, there is no way that the former president wasn't aware that he was breaking the law based solely upon testimony comments from his lawyers that they had battled with him to return the sensitive government documents he was hoarding at his Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster resorts.
"None of that apparently mattered to Mr. Trump. Before he left Washington in January 2021, he ordered a fleet of trucks to carry away hundreds of boxes of letters, reports, memos and other documents he’d received as president," Rove wrote before adding, "Those documents didn’t belong to Mr. Trump, and he surely knew that. The president’s lawyers and staff must have warned him he couldn’t take the files."
Worse still, he elaborated, Trump's comments since the documents were reclaimed by the FBI after months of stalling show he is unfit for office.
"Mr. Trump says there’s no criminal penalty for violating the Presidential Records Act. That’s true, but it only highlights how damning his behavior was," he wrote, "Congress thought a law so simple and clear would be honored by anyone entrusted with the presidency. Instead of living up to his office, Mr. Trump treated it and America’s national security flippantly, taking thousands of presidential records, among them hundreds of highly classified documents."
Now, Rove claimed, Trump's actions have come back to haunt not just him, but the whole country.
"Extreme as this situation is, it could easily have been avoided if Mr. Trump simply followed the law and left behind his precious keepsakes," he wrote before adding, "No matter the outcome, America will pay a high price for the former president’s reckless petulance. So will he."
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