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Former President Donald Trump insisted he ‘very legally’ took classified government documents from the White House in a new interview. The 77-year-old sat down with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly on Wednesday to lambast the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. ‘I was dealing with them,’ Trump said. ‘We were dealing fine. And then all of a sudden they raided this house. They raided Mar-a-Lago.’ He denounced the FBI as ‘corrupt.’
Prosecutors allege that Trump packed hundreds of classified documents into boxes as he prepared to leave the White House in 2021. After retrieving hundreds of documents from the Florida estate in January 2022, the government reached out to Trump, believing he still had materials in his possession. Trump’s attorney signed a letter stating that to her knowledge, no such documents remained onsite.
But during the raid later that year, more than 100 other documents were recovered from boxes stored neatly in a ballroom, a bathroom and a storage room. In Wednesday’s interview, Trump noted that President Joe Biden faced similar allegations of retaining classified documents. ‘But they release Biden,’ Trump raged. ‘There’s something going on because they’re going after me viciously. Then all of a sudden it comes out that Biden took 10 times the number of documents that I did.’ He claimed that he took the materials ‘very legally’ and ‘wasn’t hiding anything.’
Also in 2022, FBI agents conducted a search on Biden’s Delaware home and found he had retained classified documents from his time as a senator and vice president. These included files about Afghanistan and drafts of a handwritten memo to former President Barack Obama urging him not to send more troops into the country. In a report released early last month, Special Counsel Robert Hur compared the two cases and outlined the decision to charge Trump and not Biden.
The refrain was that Trump ‘obstructed justice’ in thwarting government efforts to recover the documents, whereas Biden cooperated. He portrayed the sitting president as an elderly man with a poor memory, a characterization that has been met with resistance on both sides of the aisle. The differences between the two cases were ‘clear,’ Hur (Pictured) wrote. While Biden agreed to searches of his properties and sat for a voluntary interview, the allegations in Trump’s case present ‘serious aggravating facts.’ ‘Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite,’ Hur wrote.
Trump was hit with 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information, with each pertaining to a specific document labeled as ‘SECRET’ or ‘TOP SECRET.’ The information within the files concerned U.S. nuclear weapons and the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.
Trump faces a total of 40 felony charges in the case. During the interview Trump unleashed his fury on Special Counsel Jack Smith, the attorney leading the charge to prosecute him in the classified documents case. Smith, who brought the indictments in Washington, D.C., and South Florida, was deemed ‘a total animal’ and ‘a deranged individual.’
Trump then implied that Smith was acting at the behest of the current president. ‘He was told to do a number on me because they think that’s the way Biden gets elected,’ Trump said. ‘This has never happened in this country before. If I was going to fight it in a nice way, I don’t think I’d be successful.’ Trump was sure to laud his administration’s accomplishments in comparison to the Biden administration’s perceived failures. These included ‘safest border,’ ‘greatest economy,’ ‘greatest regulation cuts,’ ‘rebuilt the military’ and ‘created Space Force.’
The GOP frontrunner said he had to ‘fight back’ and refused to be ‘phony.’ ‘If I didn’t fight tough, if I didn’t fight nasty and do it the way that I have to do it, I wouldn’t be interviewed right now,’ he said. ‘No, I have to do it strong.’ Amid ongoing legal turmoil, Trump insisted he was being targeted by investigators and prosecutors, labelling them ‘evil people.’ ‘These people, many of them, you know, they make up false stories like Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. That was a hoax. That was a long – it took me two years to get rid of that thing,’ he spouted.
He was speaking in reference to the Steele dossier, a research report compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele who once ran the Russia desk for MI6. The dossier detailed alleged links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin. It also included now-infamous allegations of sexual activity that Trump engaged in at a Moscow hotel. Just last week, the former president was ordered to pay $382,000 in legal fees to Orbis Business Intelligence, Steele’s company, after unsuccessfully trying to sue.
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