Trump lashes out after Fox analyst compares Biden think tank documents to FBI’s Mar-a-Lago haul

A comparison of the dozen Obama-era documents at a Washington DC think once used by Joe Biden lawyers with the massive cache of classified material retrieved during an FBI search of former president Donald Trump’s home has left the twice-impeached ex-president more than a bit irate.

Mr Trump took to his Truth Social platform to lash out at Karl Rove, the former George W Bush White House official and GOP strategist, after Mr Rove unfavourably compared the matter of the ongoing probe into Mr Trump’s alleged unlawful retention of national defence information with the review of what Mr Biden’s lawyers reported to the National Archives in November.

Speaking on Fox News late Tuesday, Mr Rove said the “differences” between the two cases are significant.

“For example, how many documents in Biden’s case, there appear to be about 10. In the case of President Trump, hundreds,” he said. He also noted that it’s not known how the documents at issue got to a locked closet at the Penn Biden Centre in Washington, but he pointed out that Mr Trump had ordered the documents retrieved during the 8 August search of his Mar-a-Lago property to be transferred from the White House to his Florida home.

Mr Rove also noted that Mr Biden’s lawyers “immediately” notified “appropriate authorities” of what they’d found, while Mr Trump engaged in an 18-month fight with the National Archives over what he’d had stashed at his property.

“We spent a year and a half watching the drama unfold in Mar-a-Lago, and it had to end in a police search to recover the documents,” he said.

Apparently miffed at Mr Rove’s explanation of events, Mr Trump wrote that the ex-Bush administration official was “as usual, wrong” in his assessment that the two cases were “in any way similar” because the documents found by Mr Biden’s lawyers were in an office “for many years,” rather than the Florida beach club he calls home. Mr Trump further suggested that his document hoard was less serious because his home receives Secret Service protection, though the storage room at issue was not guarded by his security detail.

The ex-president also mistakenly argued that Mr Biden “had no power to declassify” records as vice president, even though the vice president, like the president, is considered an original classification authority with the power to classify and declassify information at will.

Continuing, Mr Trump falsely claimed that the Obama-Biden documents wouldn’t have been covered under the Presidential Records Act even though the vice president’s office is part of the Executive Office of the President, and suggested he was having “productive discussions” with the National Archives and Records Administration even though the agency was forced to ask the Justice Department to intervene after he refused to return thousands of documents that rightly belonged in the archives.