By Daniel Dale
Former President Donald Trump made a speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday night after he was arraigned in Manhattan on felony charges of falsifying business records — and delivered a barrage of false claims that have been previously debunked.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all the charges Tuesday.
The former president was repeatedly inaccurate when he pivoted to the subject of the federal investigation into his handling of official documents. He also repeated some of his favorite falsehoods on a variety of other subjects.
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s claims.
Presidential Records Act
Trump, denouncing the August federal search of Mar-a-Lago, claimed that the Presidential Records Act requires prolonged negotiations over the return of documents.
He said: “Just so everyone knows, I come under what’s known as the Presidential Records Act, which was designed and approved by Congress long ago just for this reason. Under the act, I’m supposed to negotiate with NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration.” He went on to disparage NARA.
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The Presidential Records Act says that, the moment a president leaves office, the National Archives and Records Administration gets custody and control of all presidential records from his administration. Nothing in the law says there should be a negotiation between a former president and NARA over a former president’s return of presidential documents — much less that there should have been a monthslong battle after NARA first contacted Trump’s team in 2021 to try to get some of the records that had not been handed over at the end of his presidency.
Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, told CNN in an email last week (when we fact-checked a similar false claim by Trump): “The former President is simply wrong as a matter of law. As of noon on January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, all presidential records of the…
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