The group Republican Accountability has released a new advertisement slamming former president Donald Trump’s excuse that he was too “busy” to return boxes of classified documents to the US government.
Mr Trump has claimed, first in a rally at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey last week and then again during a Fox News interview earlier this week, that he failed to return the documents because they were mixed up with his personal belongings and he hadn’t had a chance to go through them yet when the federal government called.
The advertisement opens with a narrator asking “Why did Donald Trump refuse to return highly sensitive classified documents?”
It then cuts to Mr Trump speaking on Fox News.
“I want to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out and I was very busy, as you’ve sort of seen,” Mr Trump says in the Fox News clip.
“That’s right,” the narrator says. “He was too busy to comply with a subpoena because he was too busy DJing at Mar-a-Lago.”
The advertisement then spends the next 30 or so seconds detailing some of what Mr Trump has been up to since leaving the White House in 2021.
“Too busy crashing random people’s weddings,” the narrator says, as images of Mr Trump engaged in various leisure activities appear on the screen. “Too busy going to multiple UFC fights. Too busy selling NFTs. Too busy dancing to the Village People by the pool. Too busy golfing.”
Whatever his reasons, Mr Trump is now facing 37 felony counts over his mishandling of the documents and refusal to return them. He is the first president to ever face federal indictment, pleading not guilty to the charges at a courthouse in Miami last Tuesday.
Mr Trump is also under indictment in New York over his alleged role in a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels and could face further indictments over his attemps to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.
Nevertheless, the former president continues to lead polls of the 2024 Republican nominating contest by a wide margin. Whether his legal issues affect his standing either in the Republican primary or the general election remains to be seen, but they do appear to be raising the personal stakes of the upcoming presidential election for Mr Trump.
“Trump has no respect for the law,” the narrator’s concluding statement begins. “He doesn’t think rules apply to him — especially when he’s so busy.”
