Former George W Bush administration adviser Karl Rove tore into Donald Trump on Wednesday for taking sensitive White House documents to Mar-a-Lago, saying the former president had “no right to do so” under the law.
“Let’s be clear on this. None of these government documents are his to have taken,” Mr Rove said, interrupting a host on Fox News who referred to some of the documents in question as belonging to Mr Trump.
“A lot of the former president’s problems are of his own creation,” the Republican politico continued. “Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, you cannot take original documents out of the White House when you leave, whether it’s the president of the United States or any of his aides. It’s verboten under the law.”
In a Tuesday court filing, Justice Department officials provided more details about the presidential documents they seized from a storage room at the president’s Florida residence, including pictures of top secret documents strewn across the floor.
Prosecutors said a number of seized documents were so highly classified that “even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys conducting the review” had to be issued special security clearances before they could look at the documents without themselves running afoul of US law.
Agents said they also found evidence showing that records “were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room” in what they said was “likely” an effort to “obstruct the government’s investigation”.
In its filing, the government argued against Mr Trump’s demand that an outside arbitrator, known as a special master, be called in to help manage the review of the seized documents. The DoJ said Mr Trump “lacks standing to seek judicial relief or oversight as to Presidential records because those records do not belong to him”, but rather to the US government.
Mr Trump has called the FBI investigation a “witch hunt” and claimed the government “broke into my home” to find the documents.
“They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them,” he wrote in a recent post on his Truth Social network.
His lawyers have asserted he’s done nothing wrong and remained cooperative with the government, dismissing the search for the records as “the stuff of an overdue library book.”
“We think the chronology of co-operation by Mr Trump and his lawyers at the time is devastating to this idea of some sort of wilful violation of law,” attorney Jim Trust said in an interview on Fox News. “It really shows a president who was accommodating.”
