As the Malignant Loser's fire- hose of falsehoods about his 7 count federal indictment (see post below) ramps up, Daniel Dale rebuts the major ones (excerpted):
False claim: Trump was following the Presidential Records Act by refusing to immediately return documents
... Trump’s claim is false. The Presidential Records Act says that, the moment a president leaves office, NARA gets custody and control of all presidential records from his administration. Nothing in the law says there should be a negotiation between a former president and NARA over a former president’s return of presidential documents – much less that there should have been a months long battle after NARA first contacted Trump’s team in 2021 to try to get some of the records that had not been handed over at the end of his presidency...
False claim: Obama, the Bushes and others took millions of documents home with them after leaving office
... This is all false, as NARA itself pointed out in a statement in 2022. In reality, NARA was granted custody of the presidential records of former presidents (beginning with Ronald Reagan as soon as these presidents left office) as soon as these presidents left office, as required by the Presidential Records Act, and it was NARA, not those presidents, that moved those documents out of the nation’s capital to NARA-managed temporary archival facilities near where their permanent presidential libraries would be built. The NARA-managed facility where records from the George H.W. Bush administration were stored was indeed a former restaurant and bowling alley, but it had been turned into a full-fledged archival facility, and professionally secured in various ways, by the time the documents were moved in...
False claim: The federal government could have simply asked for the documents back
... It is not true that federal investigators could have easily obtained the government records in Trump’s possession just by asking. By the time of the August 2022 search, the federal government had been asking Trump for more than a year to return official records from his presidency. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May 2022 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 2022, 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...
Unsupported claim: Trump declassified everything
... Trump and his team have not provided any proof that Trump actually conducted some sort of broad declassification of the documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago – and, so far, his lawyers notably have not argued in their court filings that Trump did so. Eighteen former top Trump administration officials, including two former White House chiefs of staff who spoke on the record, told CNN in August that they never heard of a standing Trump declassification order when they were serving in the administration and that they now believe the claim is false. The former officials used words like “ludicrous,” “ridiculous” and “bullsh*t.”...
Unsupported claim: The FBI might be wrongly describing empty folders as actual documents
... There is no evidence that the FBI has wrongly described empty folders. In fact, the Justice Department’s detailed inventory of the items seized at Mar-a-Lago – an inventory submitted in court by a senior FBI agent under penalty of perjury – explicitly lists “empty folders” separately, distinguishing them from the government documents that were recovered. The inventory lists 103 government documents with classification markings, hundreds of government documents without classification markings, and 88 empty folders – including 46 empty folders that had “CLASSIFIED” banners on them. None of the government documents is just an empty folder, according to the inventory...
Unsupported claim: The feds might have planted evidence
... Nobody has provided any evidence that anyone has planted anything at Mar-a-Lago or amid the items seized at Mar-a-Lago. Despite Trump’s own claims, Trump’s legal team has never argued in a court filing that the FBI or Justice Department planted evidence – even when it was given an explicit opportunity to do so. 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...
False claim: Biden has been ‘totally uncooperative’
... It’s not true that Biden has been “totally uncooperative” with the federal probe into his own handling of government records – either in general or specifically with regard to the more than 1,850 boxes of records from his US Senate career that he donated to the University of Delaware, his alma mater. And it’s not true that nobody knows where these boxes are; it has been publicly known since 2012 that they are housed at the university...
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This is just a summary of Dale's article, which has more detail and supporting information.
Starting almost immediately, the Malignant Loser, his consiglieres, his Republican coup caucus, and the dead-enders in Christofascist media were busy spewing these arguments and other whataboutisms in order to muddy the prosecutorial waters and fire up their mouth- breathing base. The Malignant Loser and his lawless party will have the megaphone and will use it shamelessly. It's important that there be push- back whenever these false, destructive arguments are made. Unfortunately, the Special Counsel's and DOJ's lips will be largely sealed until the charging documents are made public, and beyond that their comments will be slim and none to protect the integrity of the prosecution. Also, unfortunately, that means we have to depend on the media to do its job, stick to the facts, and expose the lies. What are the chances of that happening on a regular basis?
In any event, this is a start, so kudos to Dale.
(Image: photo illustration by Salon/ Getty Images)
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