From the moment Donald Trump announced the FBI had searched his
Mar-a-Lago residence to the public release of the search warrant that
unveiled the former president is under investigation for potential
obstruction of justice and Espionage Act violations, Trump world has
thrown out a series of shifting explanations. And they haven’t all stuck.
Team Trump’s approach to lean into the political firestorm comes even as
the former president reportedly asked Attorney General Merrick Garland, privately via a Justice Department official, what he could do to “reduce
the heat.” Meanwhile, he continues to use the investigation as a
fundraising tool, with an email out to supporters Monday morning
declaring: “The Left will do anything to stop me from SAVING AMERICA.”
As more information trickles out about the scope of the government’s investigation into the former president, here’s a timeline of Trump
world’s shifting defense.
It’s a “witch hunt.”
Right out of the gate on Aug. 8, with a lengthy statement confirming the
FBI search, Trump used all the key words: “dark times,” “under siege,” “Radical Left Democrats,” “weaponization of the Justice System,” “prosecutorial misconduct,” “political persecution” and “witch hunt.”
After Mar-a-Lago search, Republicans scrutinize FBI
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Trump cast the search as a potential threat to Republican success in the midterm elections and his chance at a 2024 reelection bid. He called the
law enforcement action corrupt, and posed this question: “What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the
Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the
home of the 45th President of the United States.”
First Hillary Clinton, then Barack Obama.
It was no surprise Trump immediately brought up Hillary Clinton’s
handling of her emails while she was secretary of State, but in the days following the search, he invoked another name: former President Barack
Obama.
As more information was published about the material Trump possessed,
and Garland moved to unseal the search warrant, the former president
released a statement accusing Obama of keeping 33 million pages of
documents, “much of them classified.”
“How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!” he said.
The National Archives and Records Administration quickly responded with
its own statement on Friday, noting it obtained “exclusive legal and
physical custody” of Obama’s records when he left the White House in
2017. Roughly 30 million pages of unclassified records were transferred
to a NARA facility in the Chicago area, NARA said, and this material is maintained “exclusively” by the federal agency.
I did nothing wrong.
On the day the search warrant was unsealed, Trump put forth a new
explanation about why he kept highly classified documents — and it’s
likely to be at the center of his legal defense moving forward.
Trump’s office provided a statement to John Solomon, the conservative journalist who is one of the former president’s authorized
representatives to the National Archives. The statement said Trump
regularly took classified material to Mar-a-Lago, and that he had issued
a never-before-revealed “standing order” that documents removed in this fashion “were deemed to be declassified.”
“The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the President of the United States,” the statement read. “The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat, with classification authority delegated BY THE PRESIDENT, needs to approve of declassification is absurd.”
Trump kept his Saturday statement short. He proclaimed he has “TRUTH” on his side, and “when you have TRUTH, you will ultimately be victorious!”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/15/trump-worlds-shifting-narrative-on-the-mar-a-lago-docs-00051935
Bunch of spaghetti dodgers! HawHawHaw!
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