WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump is in criminal legal trouble because, according to a federal indictment, in various ways he blocked officials from retrieving official records that are the property of the government, including highly classified materials.
Here’s what we know:
Why Trump is facing criminal charges
If Trump had given back, when asked, the documents he took with him from the White House, it is highly unlikely he would have been charged with any crime.
To support that conclusion: The 37 charges Trump faces do not accuse him of violating the Presidential Records Act. That law requires turning over records created by a president or vice president to the National Archives and Records Administration — NARA — upon leaving the White House.
Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, will be arraigned Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Miami. The indictment includes 31 counts of willful retention of National Defense Information, with the remaining charges dealing with conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding and corruptly concealing a document or record, and making false statements.
Trump’s claims ignore allegations as he plays for support
Trump is defending himself in the court of public opinion — we don’t know his legal defense yet — by making untrue statements (about former President Barack Obama’s records, for example) and engaging in “whataboutism” — that is, what about the others he says did what he did and never got into trouble. It’s a ploy by Trump and his allies to deflect from the substance of the serious allegations against him.
• Last January, Attorney General Merrick Garland named Robert Hur as special counsel to probe whether President Joe Biden improperly handled classified documents found in his Delaware home and an office he once used in Washington.
• Earlier in June, the Justice Department announced former Vice President Mike Pence will not be charged in the wake of classified documents found in his Indiana home.
The BIG difference: Biden and Pence teams cooperated with authorities and turned over what they had.
• Trump on CNN’s Republican Presidential Town Hall last month said Biden “has 1,850 boxes. He had boxes sent to Chinatown. Chinatown, where they don’t speak even English in that Chinatown we’re talking about.” That’s Trump falsely asserting Biden is doing something worse. Biden, a University of Delaware graduate, donated 1,875 boxes of his Senate records to his school. Members of Congress retain control of their papers. It’s been known for years where the Biden Senate records are kept.
It’s important to read the indictment
Please read the indictment for yourself — if nothing else, you’ll be very informed about Trump and the steps he took to keep the government in the dark about the boxes of materials from his presidency he retained.
It’s an easy, interesting read, devoid of legalese. The indictment tells the story of how Trump took boxes to his Mar-a-Lago estate when he left the White House and the extreme lengths he took to keep them, even hiding information from his lawyers about the boxes stored in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, bedroom and bathroom.
Each charge is backed by witness testimony, pictures and-or recordings, even one of Trump heard talking about a classified document he is showing off.
1978 Presidential Records Act at a glance
According to the National Archives and Records Administration, the Presidential Records Act:
• Requires the president to separate personal documents from official records BEFORE leaving office.
• At the end of a presidency, NARA takes custody of presidential records.
In a Friday statement. NARA said: “There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports.”
“If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA.”
President Ronald Reagan was the first president covered by the 1978 Presidential Records Act. Congress passed the PRA in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
Before that, records were the personal property of presidents. Trump in his statements has conflated the present and past rules governing presidential papers, saying Nixon was paid for his papers.
Here’s what happened:
On June 12, 2000, the Justice Department announced an agreement to pay Nixon’s estate $18 million for “his presidential papers, tape recordings and other materials.” Those records are now in the NARA-operated Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif.
Obama did not take records with him
With the federal criminal investigation heating up last year, on Aug. 12, Trump started falsely accusing Obama of keeping millions of records from his administration.
In a statement sent to the press, Trump said, “President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. ... How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
Trump was wrong then — and wrong at CNN’s Republican Presidential Town Hall last month when he said, “I took the documents. I’m allowed to. You know who else took them? Obama took them. Nixon took them. Reagan took them.”
As I’ve written before, all of the documents from the Obama administration are in NARA’s custody. NARA took legal and physical control of records and artifacts from Obama’s two terms when they ended on Jan. 20, 2017.
NARA shipped 33 million of Obama’s records to 2500 W. Golf Road in Hoffman Estates, under the impression Obama wanted an official presidential library in his presidential center, now being built in Jackson Park. Turned out, he did not. Obama nixed a NARA-run library at his center to save millions of dollars. A NARA-operated library comes with a hefty price tag for endowments and building costs. The classified material was eventually sent to a NARA facility in Maryland.
For now, Hoffman Estates is the official home of the Barack Obama Presidential Library.
The Obama Library is closed to the public. And not easy to spot. It’s in a leased former furniture store on a busy street. NARA — not Obama — has custody of the records of the Obama administration.
Read the indictment below:
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