Following the events of January 6 andTrump's departure from the White House, the Trump administration aide, who remained within the former president's inner circle, said Several months before the FBIraided Mar-a-Lagofor classified material, the document was obtained through theNational Archives .
His Kash Patel, a former appointee of the Department of Defense, pulled documents from the archives related to a number of topics, including Trump's investigation into his 2016 campaign. I was leading a campaign to acquire. , until his 2020 impeachment, and even his January 6th. The campaign was led by order of Donald Trump. The former president and Mr. Patel apparently wanted to obtain the documents the president ordered to be declassified just before he left the White House.
ABC News first reported on the initiative on Thursday.
There is no indication that Mr. Patel did anything other than go through the appropriate routes in an attempt to obtain documents from the Archives. He has not been accused of any wrongdoing. But this episode is important. Because at least some members of the team of advisors closest to Donald Trump have been accused of unlawfully storing classified documents in Maralago, amid accusations that Trump was unlawfully storing classified documents in Maralago. Because it proved that I knew the procedure well.
However, according to Patel, in one interview flagged by the ABC report, Trump himself wanted the documents to be transferred to his property when he left the White House. , This is not proper procedure. Mr. Patel ironically complained in an interview that White House staff followed proper protocol and returned the documents in question to the public archives.
"White House attorneys and corporations disobeyed an executive order and introduced federal bureaucracy to basically send the stash to the National Archives, where it is now." He said June. ABC.
A spokesperson for Mr. Patel told news outlets that the former Defense Department adviser had been appointed "a representative on behalf of President Trump to work with the National Archives to release information."
"The GSA has its own policies and procedures on how it must handle presidential records, and Patel is fully cooperating with this," they said. .
The former president vehemently denied having illegally stored classified material in Maralago and falsely accused former President Barack Obama of committing the same transgression to build a presidential library. Obama is known to have worked with the Archives to obtain project documentation and has never been accused of wrongdoing on the matter by credible sources.
Mr. Trump also launched a campaign to smear the FBI and the Department of Justice for the execution of the search warrant against him. He baselessly accuses authorities of planting evidence in boxes of seized documents, and since his criticism of raids and federal law enforcement began, at least one act of violence targeting the FBI has already taken place.
