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Former President Donald Trump offered a dizzying multitude of new justifications Monday for keeping classified material after leaving the White House and refusing to give them back to the National Archives and Records Administration.
“I was very busy,” he told Fox News’ Bret Baier, explaining that he wanted to go through all the boxes identified by the Archives to remove personal things before handing them over.
Trump said he wanted to pull out “all sorts of things, golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes,” interspersed with papers in his boxes.
He deflected about why exactly he kept all the sensitive material in the first place: “I don’t say I do.”
And as for the classified Pentagon document, which CNN first reported Trump is on tape acknowledging he held onto, the former president offered a new answer. He told Baier the paper he waved in front of people – which, according to the indictment, did not have security clearance – was not the document in question.
“I didn’t have any document per se,” he said, claiming the papers he had were newspaper and magazine articles.
And he denied to Baier that the Iran attack plan was ever in the boxes of documents – “not that I know of,” he said.
But during a Fox News town hall earlier this month, Trump said he didn’t “know anything about” the summer 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club captured on the audio recording – a meeting that his former chief of staff appeared to recount in detail in his memoir, including a description of the document.
The changing and fuzzy explanations create the picture of a man unwilling to cooperate with records laws for the nation he again wants to lead.
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