Longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News host Martha MacCallum that former President Donald Trump should not have taken those top-secret documents. That shouldn't even really have to be said, but here we are.
MacCallum noted that the former President claimed that the sensitive documents seized by the FBI were his and claimed that he declassified what he took, although that claim seems dubious.
"The Trump side has their lawyers and their feelings about what was rightfully his and able to take," MacCallum said.
Rove wasn't having it.
"Well, let's just be clear on this, none of these government documents are his to have taken," he said. "I agree with the deputy director, who said that a lot of the former President's problems are of his own creation. You can't — under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, you cannot take original documents with you when you leave the White House. When there is the President of the United States or any of his aides, you know — that's forbidden under the law."
"But why the former president packed up 20 nearly 30-some-odd boxes of material when he had no right to do so," Rove added. "And that's what the government asserts in this filing that he — the former president asked for the return of the documents because, as he said in his filing, they were created in his administration. And the response from the government was, that's evidence that they aren't his if they were developed in the White House during his time of presidency under the Presidential Records Act. They belong to the government, not to him."
Trump knows that the docs do not belong to him. He knows it because the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has requested that Trump return the government documents since early 2021. And it wasn't just NARA. But for some reason, the self-entitled President with a history of never taking responsibility for his actions thinks that America's documents belong to him.
