Donald Trump’s apparent admittance during a campaign rally in Florida that he removed presidential documents after he left office has been described as damaging to his case in the criminal trial by legal experts.
Lawyer George Conway, husband of former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and frequent Trump critic, was one of those who commented on the remarks made by the former president as he spoke at a campaign rally for Florida Senator Marco Rubio in Miami on Sunday.
During the event, Trump accused the Department of Justice and the FBI of being “weaponized” against him.
EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI/AFP/Getty Images
“Including of course, the very famous raid on Mar-a-Lago and the document hoax case,” Trump said, prompting boos from the crowd.
“Which violated my Fourth Amendment rights and something that has never been done to another president—no other president has ever done this—presidents leave, they take things, they take documents, they take things, they read them. Nobody else has ever gone through this. This is a charade.” Trump added.
While sharing a clip of Trump’s remarks, Conway described them as “admissible evidence.”
The former president has long denied any wrongdoing in the criminal investigation into allegations he mishandled classified and top-secret documents removed by FBI agents from his Mar-a-Lago resort in August and then attempted to hinder federal attempts to retrieve them.
Among some of Trump’s lines of defense include the disputed claim he declassified all the materials removed from his Florida home as president.
Trump has also pushed an unsubstantiated claim that the FBI may have “planted” evidence against him during the raid, a claim neither he or his legal team have repeated in official court filings.
Trump’s claim that he was within his right to take documents when he left the White House in January 2021 is also disputed.
Under law, which was implemented in the wake of the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal, every presidential document must be sent to the National Archives when the president leaves office as the materials are considered property of the American people.
Trump and his defenders have attempted to suggest that taking the documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago was the same as when Barack Obama moved materials to an abandoned furniture store in Chicago after he left office.
However, while millions of Obama administration documents were moved away from the White House, with the plan to eventually house them in a library which was never built, the materials were still maintained and owned by the National Archives and Records Administration and stored in a NARA facilities. It was also the NARA, not the former president, who put the documents in temporary storage.
Crucially, none of the millions of Obama Presidential records moved by the NARA were classified.
Presidents are allowed to access their documents for up to 12 years after their term ends, with permission from the National Archives.
“No president has the right to retain presidential records after he or she leaves office,” Jason R. Baron, who served as director of litigation at the National Archives, previously told NPR.
“And so it is an extraordinary circumstance if presidential records are found in a former president’s residence or anywhere else under his control.”
Other legal experts also commented on Trump’s remarks at the Florida rally on Twitter.
Katie S. Phang, attorney and MSNBC contributor, wrote that the comments were “more and more admissions…”
The Twitter account for the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) group said: “Here’s Trump apparently admitting to illegally taking top secret documents when he left the White House.”
Trump has been contacted for comment.