Donald Trump's allies have offered a variety of excuses for the former president hoarding classified documents at Mar-A-Lago, but Fox News host brushed away those arguments with a key unanswered question.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem appeared Wednesday on "Fox & Friends," where she suggested the Department of Justice should allow a special master to look through the seized materials for anything that might be covered under executive privilege, but prosecutors say Trump has no standing to make that request because the documents belong to the government, not the former president.
"The one thing I've heard across this country, Republicans, Democrats, the public, they don't trust the DOJ and they want this to be transparent," Noem said. "They don't think they need a special master to come in and look at this, that's ridiculous. Hiding these documents and this information, keeping it within the DOJ is wrong. It needs to be transparent so people can build trust back in the FBI and the DOJ and what they're doing."
None of those arguments matter, Doocy said, because Trump and his team have never justified any reason to take those from the White House when his presidency ended.
"Ultimately comes down to what he had all that secret stuff at Mar-A-Lago," Doocy said. "I know his team said that they've declassified it, but that's news to the agencies that those documents belong to and, governor, he had apparently three classified documents in his desk, and as Brian [Kilmeade] detailed, the stuff on the floor, it shows five yellow folders marked top-secret and another says secret SCI, which means sensitive compartmentalized information. Those are the biggest secrets in the world."
The government has been asking for those documents for months, but Trump turned over only a portion of what had been requested, and investigators said his attorneys filed false statements about what he had and where those materials were located.
"Apparently the former president went through them in January," Doocy said. "Why wouldn't he say, 'You know what? I need to turn that back over.' Why would he have all that stuff at Mar-A-Lago?"
Watch video below or at this link.
Steve Doocy to Kristi Noem: "Ultimately, it comes down to why did he have all that secret stuff at Mar-a-Lago? I know his team has said they declassified it, but that's news to the agencies that those documents belong to." pic.twitter.com/WVm1LvbiPs
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 31, 2022
