Former president Donald Trump has said that the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara) is run by a “radical left group”.
The former president’s comments came during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night.
He said while he understood “there can be a process” to declassify documents but “it doesn’t have to be a process” for the US president.
“You’re the president, you make that decision. So when you send it, it’s declassified. I declassified everything,” he said.
“Now, I declassified things and we were having a lot of problems with Nara,” the one-time president further said.
“You know, Nara is a radical left group of people running that thing and when you send documents over there, I would say there's a very good chance a lot of those documents will never be seen again,” he added.
However, he did not elaborate on what he meant by the statement.
The former president also repeated his claim that dozens of secret and confidential papers seized at this Mar-a-Lago home had been declassified.
“You know, there’s different people say different things.
“There doesn’t have to be [a process], as I understand it. If you’re the president of the United States, you can declasify just by saying ‘it’s declassified’, even by thinking about it. Because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or to wherever you’re sending it.”
In the interview, he suggested the FBI was trying to search for Hillary Clinton’s emails at his home and even claimed the federal agency took his will.
The former president is being investigated by the Justice Department on whether he broke the law by keeping classified documents, some of them at the very highest level of security, at his home after Nara spent the best part of a year trying to get them back.
