Trump claimed in a Tuesday post on Truth Social that newly available information reveals the Biden administration actually knew about the recent raid of his southern Florida property known as Mar-a-Lago before it happened. New information reveals no such thing.
“The White House stated strongly that they were NOT INVOLVED, and knew absolutely nothing about, the political Witch Hunt going on with me, & that they didn’t know anything at all about the Break-In of Mar-a-Lago,” Trump angrily ranted. “This was strongly reiterated again & again. WRONG! Remember, these are the people who spied on my campaign, denied it, & got caught. Through the great reporting of John Solomon (Fake Pulitzer Prize?), documents reveal they knew everything, in fact led the charge – a political NO, NO!”
Solomon, a right-wing journalist and Trump ally, revealed a letter this week dated May 10 from the head of the National Archives, who wrote, in part, that Biden delegated the decision on accepting a Trump claim of executive privilege over docs recovered from Mar-a-Lago to the Archives chief and a high-ranking Justice Department official. (The letter outlined a rejection of the claim and indicated the records agency would soon make records available to investigators.) The docs at issue there were recovered in January.
These details do not confirm that Biden knew anything at all about the Mar-a-Lago raid, which was connected to the Justice Department probe into the handling of government documents from Trump’s administration. After the Archives got 15 boxes of government records from Trump in January and found what the Archivist’s letter reveals is over 700 pages of classified documents, the agency referred the matter to the Justice Department for further investigation, which — through a chain of events — led to the August 8 raid. How would a May letter confirm Biden knew beforehand about an August raid?
In an August 9 press briefing, Biden administration press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, referring to the Justice Department: “Again, they’re independent. We’re not involved in their criminal investigation. That is not something that we do here. We give them their independence when it comes to that. And so we leave it to the Department of Justice.” For Biden to have knowledge of deliberations over whether to release Trump administration documents to FBI agents doesn’t conflict with that statement. It doesn’t mean Biden or his administration are “involved” in the actual handling of the investigation. The privilege claims from Trump’s corner were meant to shield materials recovered from Mar-a-Lago in the January boxes from FBI scrutiny. Overall, reporting from The New York Times indicates that federal agents have recovered more than 300 classified documents from Trump since he left the presidency, a total including some of the most closely guarded info in the U.S. government.