Donald Trump claims that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has “lost” nuclear secrets but that they “don’t care”.
The former president also claimed that NARA had “lost” “vast amounts of information from previous presidents.”
Mr. Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday morning to say that “NARA has ‘lost’ massive amounts of information from previous presidents, including classified and nuclear secrets all over the place, and they don’t care, they only care about prosecuting.” Trump,” even though we did everything right under the Presidential Records Act and the Clinton Socks case.”
The “Clinton Sock Case” is a reference to interviews President Bill Clinton conducted with author Taylor Branch while in the White House, with tapes of the interviews at one point kept in a sock drawer, according to a 2007 story .on CBS News.
Mr. Trump also brought up a 2012 story from the investigative nonprofit Center for Public Integrity about boxes of missing classified documents.
The center noted that a NARA investigation conducted between 2007 and 2010 found that “more than 1,500 boxes of classified documents went missing” at the Washington National Archives.
“Among the missing records are 81 boxes of documents labeled ‘Top Secret’, ‘Secret’ and ‘Restricted Data,’ among the highest categories of classification,” the nonprofit wrote more than a decade ago. “They were from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Navy, the National Mapping and Imaging Agency, the Department of Energy and other agencies. Restricted data is a special category of data related to nuclear weapons.
The loss of documents was blamed on mismanagement at the records center.
Legal experts are increasingly certain that Mr. Trump will face criminal charges for hiding thousands of pages of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago.
What burst into the national conversation with the stunning attack on the president’s home last month is now a bogged down legal battle between Mr. Trump’s lawyers, the Justice Department and a special master appointed at the former president’s request.
But as with many investigations in recent years, the FBI’s probe of Mr. Trump has led to a steady stream of leaks to the media that have painted a picture of an investigation that people familiar with the matter say may have passed the stage of proving wrongdoing. The question now is whether the Justice Department decides the case is worth pursuing, not the strength of the case itself.
That was the conclusion of Andrew Weissman, a former Justice Department lawyer assigned to work with special counsel Robert Mueller’s office during the Trump-Russia investigation.
Mr. Weissman pointed to the latest leaks from the investigation: a Washington Post story showing that one of Mr. Trump’s aides testified to the FBI about moving boxes of documents on the former president’s orders.
“Between that […] and Alex Cannon’s testimony (to name just two recent developments) Trump’s MAL goose is cooked. As I have often said, the issue is no longer the evidence, but the will of the Justice Department,” Mr. Weissman tweeted.
George Conway, a conservative lawyer who supported Mr. Trump’s impeachment despite his wife Kellyanne Conway’s service as his 2016 campaign manager, agreed.
“It’s like an American lawyer trying to bring a big mob case against the five families and trying to hook him up with the boss, and all of a sudden they get a call from the NYPD saying, ‘Hey, big boss, capo, loads of jewelry on truck at Kennedy Airport. Here’s what happened here. He was caught at the scene,” Mr. Conway said Thursday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
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