Recent reports have outlined how Special Counsel Jack Smith has continued making progress in his investigations into Trump, an area of work that includes examining the former president’s handling of various classified materials from his time in office.
Smith’s recently reported moves include obtaining grand jury testimony from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran and, in a separate investigation, subpoenaing Mike Pence. It seems Trump is paying attention, and he has turned once again to describing the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which is a government agency that deals with historical materials both of age and newly obtained from sources like presidential administrations, as somehow overly liberal. It’s just odd to describe the agency that just files away the documents as some kind of bastion of so-called Marxism. What’s next? Yelling at the cleaning staff in the Capitol about their politics?
“Radical, Woke NARA, which placed nasty Warning Labels on our great Constitution, Declaration of Independence, & Bill of Rights, colluded with the Department of Injustice, FBI, & Hopeless Joe Biden & his lawyers to try and hide the FACT that Joe has, & had, Classified Documents at his China funded “Think Tank,” & other locations,” Trump claimed on Truth Social. “These same Weaponized Agencies Persecute & Harass me, my family, & my supporters. They are a disgrace! RESTORE EQUAL JUSTICE IN AMERICA. Shut down the Marxists. MAGA!!!”
A previous fact-check from PolitiFact notes that the so-called warning labels actually appear on every single page of the digital repositories made available online by the Archives, a collection of documents that could easily present readers with graphic descriptions of violence or endorsements of racism, among other pieces of history. It’s also unclear that there’s pretty much any real-world evidence at all for the idea that the agency worked to push down the story of the discovery of classified documents at locations tied to Biden. A release from the House Oversight Committee spotlighted the general dearth of public information made available by the agency in relation to the situation involving Biden, although it’s not like they’re making press releases about everything, and there’s a big difference, anyway. Biden was never raided, because he and his team were forthcoming with federal investigators.
Also, it’s unclear the Biden think tank to which Trump referred has actually received any Chinese money at all. The University of Pennsylvania, with which the institution is affiliated, has denied any such link. Towards the end of his remarks, was Trump suggesting to… shut down the National Archives? What a bizarre political position. Is that supposed to go over well with voters ahead of 2024’s election? Will they be chanting to close the Archives rather than build the wall? It basically seems like Trump wants to be re-elected as president on the basis of his own personal grievances… and that’s just about it.
