Republicans’ attempts to contrast the management of sensitive documents by former President Trump and past presidents have been criticized by former attorney general Bill Barr as “big falsehoods.”
Shannon Bream of “Fox News Sunday” questioned Barr about analogies between Trump departing the White House with secret documents and prior presidents Obama, Clinton, and Vice President Biden.
According to Barr, the difference is that prior presidents collaborated with the National Archives to preserve those materials, as opposed to Trump, who is accused of obstructing justice by attempting to withhold the papers from the federal government.
So, according to Barr, there are currently “2 huge lies” in the discussion. One is that every other president has taken every single document. In certain circumstances, they made arrangements with the records to build up a temporary location under their supervision, control, and provision of security so that records may be temporarily stored there till the libraries were prepared. Please understand that these weren’t just left in someone’s basement.