New York, (tca/dpa/GNA) – Former US president Donald Trump, on Wednesday claimed he took only folders for classified documents as “a cool keepsake” and accused “Trump-hating” feds of planting top secret documents to frame him.
Trump sought to downplay the scandal surrounding his taking hundreds of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, by focusing on the scores of empty folders found by FBI agents in an explosive August 8 search.
“These were ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them, but they were a cool keepsake,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site. “Perhaps the Gestapo took some of these empty folders when they Raided Mar-a-Lago, & counted them as a document, which they are not.”
Without offering any evidence, Trump said “Trump-hating Marxist thugs” may be planting more documents while the folders are in the hands of federal prosecutors.
He also tried to change the subject to the discovery of classified documents at President Joe Biden’s home and office, a scandal that has jolted the White House in recent days.
“(They) keep saying I had a “large number of documents” in order to make the Biden Classified Docs look less significant,” he said.
“As President … I did nothing wrong. JOE DID,” Trump added.
To the contrary, Trump fought tooth and nail to hold onto a trove of thousands of government documents and presidential records, that he improperly took when he left the White House, federal investigators say.
Trump also defied a subpoena for the return of all classified documents, prompting the search that turned up more than 300 classified documents at his oceanfront resort.
In Biden’s case, his lawyers immediately informed the feds when they found a small number of classified documents stored at an office the president once used last November.
They later launched a more extensive search, which turned up two more sets of documents at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Special counsel Jack Smith is mulling whether to file charges against Trump while special counsel Robert Hur is probing the Biden documents case.
GNA