The hosts of Morning Joe spent a segment on MSNBC mocking former President Donald Trump over his kind letters to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, as well as for a sharpie-adapted map showing the path of an incoming storm – both of which were among the documents he took with him to Florida when he left Washington, DC.
It was reported over the weekend that Mr Trump wrongly took some presidential documents from the White House as he left for Mar-a-Lago.
Host Joe Scarborough said that Trump rally attendees “would cheer whenever he would talk about his love letters with Kim Jong-un and, you know, remember not so long ago [former Fox News host] Bill O’Reilly asked him like who were his favourite world leaders to deal with?”
“Kim Jong-un was one of them. Who else did he say? Did he say Xi and Putin? ... It certainly wasn’t anybody that was elected democratically,” he added.
“There were people who were actually applauding the Kim Jong-un shout-out. I’m sitting here going, ‘okay, wait, what – why, why?’ I still don’t get it,” Mr Scarborough said.
Mr Trump presented the map that he had changed with a black marker to reporters in the White House in 2019. After wrongly predicting that the storm could hit Alabama, Mr Trump used a sharpie to make it appear as if his prediction was correct.
Mr Scarborugh said Mr Trump knew he was breaking the law when he tore up documents belonging to the government that others then attempted to tape back together.
“In mid-January 2022, NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) arranged for the transport from the Trump Mar-a-Lago property in Florida to the National Archives of 15 boxes that contained Presidential records, following discussions with President Trump’s representatives in 2021,” the National Archives said in a statement on Monday following a report by The Washington Post.
The paper reported that among the documents that the National Archives retrieved from Mr Trump’s Palm Beach residence were communications between Mr Trump and Kim Jong-un that the former president had described as “beautiful letters”.
The agency also recovered a handwritten letter from former President Barack Obama that he had written to Mr Trump and left in the Oval Office.
“The Presidential Records Act mandates that all presidential records must be properly preserved by each administration so that a complete set of presidential records is transferred to the National Archives at the end of the administration,” Archivist David Ferriero said in the statement.
He added that the National Archives “pursues the return of records whenever we learn that records have been improperly removed or have not been appropriately transferred to official accounts”.
