Karl Rove, deputy chief of staff to President George W Bush, eviscerated Donald Trump over the 37 charges he faces relating to the classified documents he hoarded at Mar-a-Lago in an opinion column, “Trump invited this indictment”, published by The Wall Street Journal on 14 June.
He echoed some other Republicans — including Bill Barr, Chris Christie, and Mike Pompeo — in his criticism of the former president, though certainly not all of his fellow Republicans.
“The blame for this calamity rests solely on Mr Trump and his childish impulse to keep mementos from his time in the Oval Office, no matter what the law says,” wrote Mr Rove.
The Republican did voice concerns over the process that led to Mr Trump being indicted: “Even so, the case will further tear our country apart, as it has a heavy impact on the presidential campaign and — wrongly — undermines confidence in our justice system.”
However, he did praise the indictment as being “devastating in its rigour of evidence and the seriousness of the alleged crimes”.
After describing the alarming nature of the classified information that Mr Trump took, Mr Rove says the former president must have known he was breaking the law: “Those documents didn’t belong to Mr Trump, and he surely knew that. The president’s lawyers and staff must have warned him he couldn’t take the files.”
Mr Rove then explains the National Security Council system for tracking such documents and that it would have been explained to the former president that the National Archives and Records Administration would have been provided with that data and would know if anything was missing and knew when he returned some that he had more — hence why an FBI search was needed to retrieve the rest.
“Mr Trump says there’s no criminal penalty for violating the Presidential Records Act. That’s true, but it only highlights how damning his behavior was. Congress thought a law so simple and clear would be honoured by anyone entrusted with the presidency,” he writes.
In his conclusion, Mr Rove is damning, writing: “Instead of living up to his office, Mr Trump treated it and America’s national security flippantly, taking thousands of presidential records, among them hundreds of highly classified documents.
“Any staffer found guilty of doing that would go to prison for breaking the laws protecting the nation’s secrets, as Mr Trump is now charged.”
Mr Rove adds that the country “will pay a high price for the former president’s reckless petulance”, but “so will he.”
