As federal investigators continue to probe which White House materials Donald Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, the former president is claiming Bill Clinton lost the nuclear codes while in office.
On Monday evening, Mr Trump reposted a statement on Truth Social from former Clinton military aide Robert “Buzz” Patterson, who wrote that, “Just a reminder, but Bill Clinton actually LOST the nuclear codes during my tenure with him. We weren’t raided.”
The Independent has reached out to Bill Clinton for comment.
Mr Patterson, as well as former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton, both claimed in books they wrote that the “biscuit,” an ID card used to access the “football,” an attache case carrying the nuclear codes, was misplaced during the Clinton administration, though the former claims the incident occured in 1998 and the latter in 2000.
"At one point during the Clinton administration," Mr Shelton wrote in his 2010 book, Without Hesitation, "the codes were actually missing for months. [...] That’s a big deal -- a gargantuan deal."
In a 2003 book, Mr Patterson, who has since become a vocal critic of liberal administrations like the Clinton and Obama eras, wrote that it was his job to give Mr Clinton an updated version of the biscuit in 1998.
"He thought he just placed them upstairs," Mr Patterson wrote. "We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them."
The White House has never confirmed whether the codes were lost, and Mr Clinton has since declined to comment on media reports about the alleged loss of the codes.
One key difference between the Trump and Clinton document allegations is that the federal government is investigating whether Mr Trump intentionally took White House documents to his Florida estate, then intentionally kept them from being retrieved or even discovered by government archivists as per federal law.
In the former general’s account, he writes that Mr Clinton probably assumed the codes were kept, as they sometimes are, with an aide travelling close to the president, and that he "assumed, I’m sure that the aide had them like he was supposed to."
Some, such as Thomas Ricks writing in Foreign Policy in 2010, questioned elements of the story about the nuclear codes.
“He reports, a bit mysteriously, that late in the Clinton administration, the president’s authorization codes to use nuclear weapons strike were lost,” he wrote. “He doesn’t really explain what happened or who knew about it, except that the guy who was supposed to make sure once a month that an aide to the president had the codes kept getting the runaround, and putting up with it.”
The right-wing accusations of a nuclear scandal echoes what investigators actually did find at Mar-a-Lago.
Among the trove of materials seized at Mr Trump’s was a document describing a foreign military’s defences, including its nuclear capabilities, the Washington Post reported in September.
