Donald Trump’s National Archives scandal just took an even more criminal turn

| 9:09 am EST February 13, 2022
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When it was reported earlier this week that the National Archives had referred Donald Trump’s removal of White House documents to the Department of Justice, it suggested that there was more going on than had been made public. Sure enough, it now turns out the scandal isn’t just criminal, it’s very criminal.

It’s not just that Trump took documents clearly marked as classified with him on his way out of the White House and stashed them at Mar-a-Lago. It’s that even after the National Archives figured out Trump had them, he refused to give them back. CNN is reporting that the National Archives had to threaten to go to Congress and the DOJ just to get Trump to return some of the records, and that he still has some of them.

This eliminates any possible legal defense that Donald Trump could try to make. He can’t claim they were taken by accident, because he initially refused to return them when asked. And he can’t even claim that he was just waiting for a proper legal explanation for why he wasn’t allowed to keep them, because he’s still refusing to return some of them. More to the point, because these documents contain classified information, he can’t simply blame it all on a subordinate.

We’ll see where this goes from here. But there’s now clear proof that Donald Trump didn’t just take these documents, he stole them with criminal intent – and he’s still holding them hostage with criminal intent. It’s almost impossible to imagine the Department of Justice ignoring this.