Former President Donald Trump, who is under federal criminal investigation for allegedly taking classified White House records to his Mar-A-Largo estate in Florida, is claiming that former president Barack Obama retained millions of records from his administration.
Simply put, Trump’s claims are completely false.
In a statement on Friday, Trump said, “President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
On Thursday, Trump took to Truth Social, the Twitter-like social media platform he founded, to say this: “What happened to the 30 million pages of documents taken from the White House to Chicago by Barack Hussein Obama? He refused to give them back! What is going on? This act was strongly at odds with NARA. Will they be breaking into Obama’s ‘mansion’ in Martha’s Vineyard”?
NARA, or The National Archives and Records Administration that Trump was referring to, issued its own statement on Friday in an attempt to counter the false statements about former president Barack Obama’s presidential records.
According to NARA, it obtained “exclusive legal and physical custody” of Obama’s records when he left office in 2017. It said that about 30 million pages of unclassified documents were transferred to a NARA facility in the Chicago area and that they continue to be maintained “exclusively by NARA.”
The statement said that classified records from Obama are kept in a NARA facility in Washington, D.C.
“As required by the [Presidential Records Act], former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration,” the statement said.
Despite the official statement, Trump continued to push these false claims.