CNN’s decision to give him an unfiltered prime-time platform was a callback to the 2016 campaign, even as the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, persistently interjected to try to cut him off or correct him.

Mr. Trump was so focused on discussing and defending himself that he barely touched on President Biden’s record — which people close to Mr. Trump want him to focus on. But he was disciplined when it came to his chief expected primary rival.

Here are five takeaways.

Trump won’t let go of his lies about 2020 or Jan. 6

If viewers were expecting Mr. Trump to have moved on from his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he demonstrated once again, right out of the gate, that he very much hasn’t.

The first questions asked by Ms. Collins were about Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in 2020, and his false claims of fraud.

“I think that, when you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens,” Mr. Trump said, calling the election he lost “rigged.”

Mr. Trump later said he was “inclined” to pardon “many” of the rioters arrested on Jan. 6, 2021, after the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob during certification of President Biden’s Electoral College win. His avoidance of an unequivocal promise pleased people close to him.

He also came armed with a list of his own Twitter posts and statements from that day — an idea that was his, a person familiar with the planning said. He lied about his inaction that day as Ms. Collins pressed him about what he was doing during the hours of violence. And he said he did not owe Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was threatened by the mob, an apology.

As time has worn on, Mr. Trump has increasingly wrapped his arms around what took place at the Capitol and incorporated it into his campaign. Wednesday night was no exception.

“A beautiful day,” he said of Jan. 6.

It was a reminder that embracing the deadly violence of that day — at least for Republicans — is no longer seen as disqualifying. Privately, Mr. Trump’s team said they were happy with how he handled the extensive time spent on the postelection period during the town hall.

The G.O.P. audience stacked the deck, but revealed where the base is

The audience’s regular interruptions on behalf of Mr. Trump were like a laugh track on a sitcom. It built momentum for him in the room — and onscreen for the television audience — and stifled Ms. Collins as she repeatedly tried to interrupt him with facts and correctives.

No matter how vulgar, profane or politically incorrect Mr. Trump was, the Republican crowd in New Hampshire audibly ate up the shtick of the decades-long showman.

He would pardon a “large portion” of Jan. 6 rioters. Applause.

He mocked the detailed accusations of rape from E. Jean Carroll as made up “hanky-panky in a dressing room.” Laughter. No matter that a New York jury held him liable for sexual abuse and defamation this week, awarding Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages.

Calling Ms. Carroll a “wack job.” Applause and laughs.

Flip-flopping on using the debt ceiling for leverage, because “I’m not president.” More laughs.

The cheers revealed the current psyche of the Republican base, which is eager for confrontation: with the press, with Democrats, with anyone standing in the way of Republicans taking power.

It made for tough sledding for Ms. Collins, who was like an athlete playing an away game on hostile turf: She had to battle the crowd and the candidate simultaneously.

“You’re a nasty person,” Mr. Trump said to her at one point, echoing the line he used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The town-hall format felt like a set piece for Mr. Trump that he leveraged to cast himself as both the putative Republican incumbent — “Mister president,” he was repeatedly addressed as — and the outsider, recreating conditions from his two previous campaigns.

Republicans cheered, but so did Democrats looking to the general election

President Biden’s team had changed the televisions on Air Force One from CNN to MSNBC as he returned from New York on Wednesday evening. But that didn’t mean his political team was not eagerly watching the town hall unfold, and cheering along with the Republican audience.

Mr. Trump defended Jan. 6 as a “beautiful day.” He hailed the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a “great victory.” He wouldn’t say if he hoped Ukraine would win the war against Russia. He talked again about how the rich and famous get their way. “Women let you,” he said. And he refused to rule out reimposing one of the most incendiary and divisive policies of his term in office: purposefully separating families at the border.

Mr. Trump’s answers played well in the hall but could all find their way into Democratic messaging in the next 18 months.

Late Wednesday, the Biden campaign was already figuring out what segments could be turned quickly into digital ads, seeing Mr. Trump staking out positions that would turn off the kind of swing voters that Mr. Biden won in 2020.

Shortly after the event ended, Mr. Biden issued a tweet. “Do you want four more years of that?” it read. It was a request for donations. It was also a reminder how much of the Biden 2024 campaign is likely to be about Mr. Trump.

Trump aggressively dodged taking a stance on a federal abortion ban

Mr. Trump is perhaps the single Republican most responsible for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year. He appointed three of the court’s justices who powered the majority opinion. But he has privately blamed abortion politics for Republican underperformance in the 2022 midterms and has treaded carefully in the early months of his 2024 run.

Before the town hall, his team spent considerable time honing his answer to a question they knew he would be asked: Would he support a federal ban, and at how many weeks?

His repeated dodges and euphemisms were hard to miss on Wednesday.

“Getting rid of Roe v. Wade was an incredible thing for pro-life,” he began.

That was about as specific as he would get. He said he was “honored to have done what I did” — a line Democrats had quickly flagged as potential fodder for future ads — and that it was a “great victory.”

Mr. Trump’s Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, getting to Mr. Trump’s right on an issue that could resonate with evangelical voters. Mr. Trump did not even mention Mr. DeSantis until more than an hour into the event, and only after prodding from a voter. “I think he ought to relax and take it easy and think about the future,” Mr. Trump urged.

In refusing to say if he would sign a federal ban, Mr. Trump tried to cast Democrats as radical and pledged that he supported exemptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. “What I’ll do is negotiate so people are happy,” he said.

“I just want to give you one more chance,” Ms. Collins pressed.

He dodged one final time. “Make a deal that’s going to be good,” he said.

He deepened his legal jeopardy with comments on investigations

The most heated exchange that Mr. Trump had with Ms. Collins was over the special counsel investigation into his possession of hundreds of presidential records, including more than 300 individual classified documents, at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, after he left office.

And it was the area in which he walked himself into the biggest problems.

“I was there and I took what I took and it gets declassified,” said Mr. Trump, who has maintained, despite contradictions from his own former officials, that he had a standing order automatically declassifying documents that left the Oval Office and went to the president’s residence.

“I had every right to do it, I didn’t make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside the White House, people were taking pictures of it,” Mr. Trump said, intimating that people were somehow aware that presidential material and classified documents were in them (they were not).

In what will be of great interest to the special counsel, Jack Smith, Mr. Trump would not definitively rule out whether he showed classified material to people, something investigators have queried witnesses about, in particular in connection with a map with sensitive intelligence.

“Not really,” he hedged, adding, “I would have the right to.” At another point he declared, “I have the right to do whatever I want with them.”

He also defended himself for a call he had with Georgia’s secretary of state in which he said he was trying to “find” enough votes to win. “I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Mr. Trump said.

There are few issues that worry the Trump team and the former president as much as the documents investigation, and Mr. Trump wore that on his face and in his words on the stage in New Hampshire.

Donald Trump consistently spread falsehoods, lies and misinformation throughout his town hall hosted by CNN on Wednesday night in front of a crowd of mostly Republican voters in New Hampshire. The former president made false and misleading claims about the 2020 election, the January 6 insurrection, immigration, his border wall, abortion, his sexual abuse trial, the investigation into his handling of classified documents and other subjects.

The host, Kaitlan Collins, attempted to interject and fact-check his claims in real time, though many falsehoods went unchecked as Trump followed his long history of touting baseless conspiracy theories amid his mounting legal troubles.

Here are the Guardian’s fact-checks of some of Trump’s statements.

Claim: Trump started off the night falsely claiming that “millions” of votes were stolen in the 2020 race, and that the election was rigged.

Factcheck: There’s no evidence of widespread fraud, and election officials across the US, including Republican leaders, have repeatedly reaffirmed this over the last two years.

The Trump campaign’s own efforts to show that thousands of ballots cast under the names of deceased people in Georgia came up empty, with findings that contradicted the former president’s claims, a recent report revealed. There is no evidence in any state of fraud or irregularities that affected any election outcomes.

Claim: Trump asserted without evidence that other countries are sending migrants from “mental institutions” into the US.

Factcheck: The former president has repeatedly made this claim, but there is no evidence to support it. Trump’s campaign has been unable to produce evidence of this, CNN recently reported. Anti-immigration groups have also said they are unaware of what Trump may be referencing with these remarks. CNN did a “broad search” for any evidence of this story and came up empty.

Trump also said the US was suffering from “open borders” in his initial remarks on immigration. On the contrary, Joe Biden has maintained many of the policies of the Trump administration, angering immigrant rights groups. The Biden administration also recently announced it was sending 1,500 active-duty troops to the US-Mexico border.

Claim: Trump misleadingly suggested that the judge in the sexual abuse and defamation trial brought by writer E Jean Carroll had prevented him from producing evidence.

Factcheck: Trump has repeatedly made false claims that he was “not allowed to speak or defend” himself. But Trump did not call any witnesses, nor did he make an appearance during the two-week trial, except when excerpts of a video deposition from last year were played in the courtroom.

The judge, Lewis A Kaplan, whom the former president has repeatedly attacked, told Trump’s legal team that he could file a request to testify, but he chose not to. The jury found that the former president sexually abused Carroll, meaning he subjected her to sexual contact with the use of force and without her consent, and ordered him to pay $5m in damages.

Claim: Donald Trump falsely claimed that pro-choice Democrats want to “kill the baby” after they are born, an assertion that went unchecked in the CNN town hall. The former president also suggested abortion rights groups want doctors to be able to “execute” babies.

Factcheck: This false and inflammatory claim was a common refrain of the former president during the last election and has no basis in fact.

Claim: Donald Trump, who as president faced widespread outrage for separating families at the US southern border, defended the policy, saying it had a deterrent effect: “People don’t come.”

Factcheck: There is no clear evidence suggesting that harsh policies such as family separation deter asylum seekers from coming to the US. A 2017 pilot program of family separation was followed by an increase of families entering the US at the border. A 2018 analysis found that the policy was not having the intended effect.

Immigrant rights groups note that policies like detaining children or separating them from their families do not discourage people from coming, and can instead lead to more dangerous journeys.

Claim: Questioned about the continuing criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia, Donald Trump misrepresented a phone call with the state’s top election official, falsely claiming, “I didn’t ask him to find anything.”

Factcheck: A recording of the phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, revealed that Trump had said: “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The former president said in the town hall that he called to “question” the election. But the recording suggested that he clearly pressured the official to overturn the election results in his favor.

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump, bent on staying in power, undertook a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including repeatedly pushing lies about the results despite knowing his claims were false, and doubling down on those falsehoods as the Jan. 6 riot raged, a sweeping federal indictment alleges.

This is the third indictment faced by the former president, who — as the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential race — continues to insist that the vote was rigged.

Prosecutors say the alleged scheme, which they say involved six unnamed co-conspirators, included enlisting a slate of so-called “fake electors” targeting several states; using the Justice Department to conduct “sham election crime investigations”; enlisting the vice president to “alter the election results”; and doubling down on false claims as the Jan. 6 riot ensued — all in an effort to subvert democracy and stay in power.

READ: Full indictment

The six alleged co-conspirators include several attorneys and a Justice Department official.

The sweeping indictment, based on the investigation by special counsel Jack Smith, charges Trump with four felony counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

The indictment alleges that Trump knew that the claims he advanced about the election, specifically in Arizona and Georgia, were false — yet he repeated them for months.

READ MORE: Trump’s 3rd indictment divides 2024 GOP candidates: Pence, DeSantis and more weigh in

It also highlights Trump’s alleged pressure campaign on his own vice president, Mike Pence, alleging that he asked Pence during a Christmas Day phone call to reject the electoral votes on Jan. 6, that he told Pence on Jan. 1 that he was “too honest,” and that he lied to Pence about election fraud to get him to accept a slate of fake electors. “Bottom line — won every state by 100,000s of votes,” Trump allegedly told Pence, according to the indictment. “We won every state.”

When that didn’t succeed, the indictment says, Trump pushed the crowd of supporters to pressure Pence into action on Jan. 6.

“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment reads. “So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.”

“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election,” reads the indictment.

Trump, speaking to ABC News after the indictment was unsealed, described the new charges as a “pile-on.”

“It’s election interference,” he told ABC News, saying he is “doing very well in the polls” and that he believes he will defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.

The former president has been summoned to appear in court on Thursday in Washington, D.C.

Pence, who is currently challenging Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, said in a statement Friday evening, “Our country is more important than one man. Our constitution is more important than any one man’s career.”

“On January 6th, Former President Trump demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” Pence said. “I chose the Constitution and I always will.”

RELATED: Who is Tanya Chutkan, the judge assigned to Trump’s latest case?

Speaking following the unsealing of the indictment, Smith called the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol “an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.”

The aim of the attack was “obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government and the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election,” Smith said.

The Trump campaign, responding to the indictment on Trump’s Truth Social platform, said, “The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes. President Trump has always followed the law and the Constitution, with advice from many highly accomplished attorneys.”

The charges mark the third time the former president has been indicted on criminal charges, following his indictment last month in the special counsel’s probe into his handling of classified materials after leaving office, and his indictment in April on New York state charges of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump, who has decried the probes as political witch hunts, pleaded not guilty to all charges in both those cases.

In the history of the country, no president or former president had ever been indicted prior to Trump’s first indictment in April.

Trump was informed by Smith on July 16 that he was a target in the election probe.

A grand jury empaneled by Smith in Washington, D.C., has been speaking with witnesses ranging from former White House aides to state election officials. Among those testifying in recent weeks have been former top Trump aide Hope Hicks and Trump’s son-in-law and former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner.

Investigators have also been speaking with election officials who are believed to have been part of the failed 2020 effort to put forward slates of so-called “fake electors” to cast electoral college votes for Trump on Jan. 6.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to oversee both the election probe and the classified documents probe, after Trump’s announcement in November that he was again running for president triggered the appointment of an independent special counsel to avoid a potential conflict of interest in the Justice Department.

CNN
 — 

Former President Donald Trump has made numerous false and unsupported claims about the federal investigation into his handling of government documents, a probe he announced Thursday has resulted in his indictment.

Here is a fact check of seven of the claims Trump has made about the investigation since the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in August 2022.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Presidential Records Act, a 1978 law, says he was supposed to hold negotiations with the National Archives and Records Administration about the return of official documents after his presidency.

For example, he said in a March 2023 interview on Fox that the law is “very specific”: “It says you are going to discuss the documents. You discuss everything – not only docu– everything – about what’s going in NARA, et cetera, et cetera. You’re gonna discuss it. You will talk, talk, talk. And if you can’t come to an agreement, you’re gonna continue to talk.”

He made a similar claim at a CNN town hall in May, saying the law “says you talk, you negotiate, you make a deal.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The Presidential Records Act says that, the moment a president leaves office, NARA gets custody and control of all presidential records from his administration. Nothing in the law says there should be a negotiation between a former president and NARA over a former president’s return of presidential documents – much less that there should have been a monthslong battle after NARA first contacted Trump’s team in 2021 to try to get some of the records that had not been handed over at the end of his presidency.

The key sentence from the Presidential Records Act is unequivocal: “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”

Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, told CNN in a March 2023 email: “The former President is simply wrong as a matter of law. As of noon on January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, all presidential records of the Trump Administration came into the legal custody of the Archivist of the United States. Full stop. That means no presidential records ever should have been transferred to Mar-a-Lago, and there was no further talking or negotiating to be had.”

Timothy Naftali, a CNN presidential historian, New York University professor and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, described Trump’s claim as “nonsense” and said the former president’s description of the Presidential Records Act is “a matter of fantasy,” concocted to allow Trump to “pretend that he’s a victim.”

The law, Naftali said in March 2023, makes clear that documents Trump had at Mar-a-Lago are presidential records that legally belong to the public and are legally required to be in NARA’s custody. The law provides “no room for debates and discussions between presidential advisers and the National Archives at the end a presidency” about such records, Naftali said.

In April 2023, the Society of American Archivists, a professional association, published its own fact check of Trump’s claim, saying it is “patently false.”

False claim: Obama, the Bushes and others took millions of documents home with them after leaving office

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has been singled out by federal law enforcement even though his predecessors as president all took documents with them after leaving office.

For example, Trump claimed in the fall of 2022 that former presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush all took millions of documents; he repeated the claim that Obama took documents at the CNN town hall in May. He also claimed that George H.W. Bush took his documents to a poorly secured Chinese restaurant and bowling alley.

Facts First: This is all false, as NARA itself pointed out in a statement in 2022. In reality, NARA was granted custody of the presidential records of former presidents (beginning with Ronald Reagan as soon as these presidents left office) as soon as these presidents left office, as required by the Presidential Records Act, and it was NARA, not those presidents, that moved those documents out of the nation’s capital to NARA-managed temporary archival facilities near where their permanent presidential libraries would be built. The NARA-managed facility where records from the George H.W. Bush administration were stored was indeed a former restaurant and bowling alley, but it had been turned into a full-fledged archival facility, and professionally secured in various ways, by the time the documentswere moved in.

After Trump began making these false claims, NARA issued an October 2022 statement saying that it gained physical and legal custody of the records from Obama, Clinton, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush “when those presidents left office.” It said of the temporary facilities to which the documents were moved: “All such temporary facilities met strict archival and security standards, and have been managed and staffed exclusively by NARA employees. Reports that indicate or imply that those Presidential records were in the possession of the former Presidents or their representatives, after they left office, or that the records were housed in substandard conditions, are false and misleading.”

In other words, there is no equivalence between Trump’s handling of presidential documents and those previous presidents’. In Trump’s case, the presidential documents found in haphazard amateur storage at Mar-a-Lago, including documents marked classified, were in Trump’s possession despite numerous attempts by both NARA and the Justice Department to get them back.

You can read a longer fact check here with additional details about the facility where the George H.W. Bush records were stored.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago was unnecessary because the federal government could have simply asked for the documentsback from him. For example, he posted on his social media platform days after the search: “They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK.”

Facts First: It is not true that federal investigators could have easily obtained the government records in Trump’s possession just by asking. By the time of the August 2022 search, the federal government had been asking Trump for more than a year to return official records from his presidency. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May 2022 and served Trump’s team with the subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trump’s team returned only some of these documents – and then, in June 2022, Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document certifying on behalf of Trump’s office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true.

In other words: Trump claimed in August 2022 that the Justice Department could have just asked for the documents “LONG ago” even though his team inaccurately told the department in June 2022 that there were no documents left to ask for.

The Justice Department said in a court filing in August 2022 that the search of Mar-a-Lago resulted in the seizure of more than 100 unique documents with classification markings. But in posts on his social media platform, Trump argued that he had declassified all of the documents in his possession. “Number one, it was all declassified,” he wrote in a post on August 12.

That same day, conservative writer John Solomon, one of the people Trump named as a representative in his dealings with NARA, read a statement on television, which he said came from Trump’s office, that claimed Trump “had a standing order…that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.” At the CNN town hall in May, Trump made a similar though vaguer claim, saying classified documents “become automatically declassified when I took them.”

Facts First: Trump and his team have not provided any proof that Trump actually conducted some sort of broad declassification of the documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago – and, so far, his lawyers notably have not argued in their court filings that Trump did so. Eighteen former top Trump administration officials, including two former White House chiefs of staff who spoke on the record, told CNN in August that they never heard of a standing Trump declassification order when they were serving in the administration and that they now believe the claim is false. The former officials used words like “ludicrous,” “ridiculous” and “bullsh*t.”

“Total nonsense,” said one person who served as a senior White House official. “If that’s true, where is the order with his signature on it? If that were the case, there would have been tremendous pushback from the Intel Community and DoD, which would almost certainly have become known to Intel and Armed Services Committees on the Hill.”

It’s important to note that the laws under which the Justice Department said it was investigating possible crimes – statutes about the willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of a federal investigation, and the concealment or removal of government records – do not require documents to be classified for a crime to have been committed. Also, there would be major questions about the legal validity of any broad “standing order” to automatically declassify any document Trump carried out of a certain room.

But first things first: Trump has shown no corroboration for the claim that he did issue such an order.

The Justice Department said in the August 2022 court filing that Trump’s representatives never asserted that documents had been declassified either when they voluntarily turned over 15 boxes that included 184 unique documents with classification markings in January (after an extended back-and-forth with NARA) or when responding to the subpoena in June 2022, when they returned another package of documents that included 38 additional unique documents with classification markings.

Trump claimed in January 2023 that the FBI might “perhaps” have inaccurately described empty folders that agents found at Mar-a-Lago with classification markings on them – perhaps wrongly describing these folders as actual documents, “which they are not.” (He said he saved the empty folders as a “‘cool’ keepsake.”)

Facts First: There is no evidence that the FBI has wrongly described empty folders. In fact, the Justice Department’s detailed inventory of the items seized at Mar-a-Lago – an inventory submitted in court by a senior FBI agent under penalty of perjury – explicitly lists “empty folders” separately, distinguishing them from the government documents that were recovered. The inventory lists 103 government documents with classification markings, hundreds of government documents without classification markings, and 88 empty folders – including 46 empty folders that had “CLASSIFIED” banners on them. None of the government documents is just an empty folder, according to the inventory.

It is theoretically possible that there are errors in the inventory; the Justice Department filed a revised version in September that made minor changes to the original inventory that was filed in August, which the government explained it had needed to complete in a single business day. But the revised version and the original version listed the same number of government documents with classification markings, 103, and the revised version had only a small change to the number of empty folders with classified banners, putting it at 46 instead of the original claim of 48.

You can read a longer fact check here.

Trump has repeatedly floated the idea the FBI or Justice Department might have planted evidence or might proceed to plant evidence.

He suggested on his social media platform in August 2022 that it was suspicious that the FBI would not allow witnesses, such as his lawyers, to be in the rooms being searched at Mar-a-Lago and “see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.’” In September 2022, Trump said in a television interview on Fox: “Did they drop anything into those files, or did they do it later?”

Facts First: Nobody has provided any evidence that anyone has planted anything at Mar-a-Lago or amid the items seized at Mar-a-Lago. Despite Trump’s own claims, Trump’s legal team has never argued in a court filing that the FBI or Justice Department planted evidence – even when it was given an explicit opportunity to do so. It is routine, not suspicious, for searches to be conducted without witnesses such as lawyers being in the room; lawyers don’t have a right to watch.

The claim about items possibly having been planted is impossible to definitively debunk at this point, and it is obviously impossible to debunk a claim about what might happen in the future. But Trump and his team have provided zero evidence to support their insinuations on this subject. Before an appeals court stopped a special master review of the seized items in late 2022, Trump’s lawyers resisted an effort by the special master to have them say in a sworn court declaration whether they believed the official inventory included items that were not actually seized from Mar-a-Lago – in other words, if they believed phony items were inserted into the evidence. A judge then ruled that they didn’t have to make this declaration.

Trump, arguing that he is being persecuted, claimed in a video statement in late April that it is President Joe Biden who is “guilty of obstruction.” He claimed that Biden has “1,850 boxes unchecked” and that “he has been totally uncooperative – won’t show the documents under any circumstances.” At a CNN town hall in May, Trump added of Biden’s “1,800” boxes: “And nobody even knows where they are.”

Facts First: It’s not true that Biden has been “totally uncooperative” with the federal probe into his own handling of government records – either in general or specifically with regard to the more than 1,850 boxes of records from his US Senate career that he donated to the University of Delaware, his alma mater. And it’s not true that nobody knows where these boxes are; it has been publicly known since 2012 that they are housed at the university.

The claim that Biden has been “totally uncooperative” with the investigation into his handling of official documents is transparently false. Biden’s team quickly handed over classified documents to federal authorities upon finding them last year at one of his homes in Delaware and at his former think tank office in Washington. And Biden has consented to FBI searches of his two Delaware homes, the Washington office and the University of Delaware.

CNN reported in February that, according to a source familiar with the investigation, the FBI had conducted two searches at the university with the consent and cooperation of Biden’s legal team. It is not clear if Biden permitted the FBI to look at each and every one of the 1,850-plus boxes of Senate papers at the university, or even if the FBI wanted to search all of those boxes; a spokesperson for Biden’s personal lawyer did not respond in early June to a CNN request for more information. But even with few details publicly known at present, it is clearly inaccurate to say Biden has not cooperated at all with regard to these records.

Biden’s Senate papers at the University of Delaware are not yet publicly available; the university website says the boxes were delivered in mid-2012 but will require Biden’s consent to view until two years after Biden retires from public life. That restriction has frustrated some Biden critics, but it is certainly not a crime – and it is normal, as the Senate’s official website explains, for senators to donate papers to a home-state research institution with conditions about when they are to be released into the public realm.

CNN
 — 

Former President Donald Trump made numerous false and misleading claims in a speech he delivered Tuesday night following his afternoon arraignment in Miami federal court to face charges of illegally retaining classified documents and obstructing the federal investigation into his conduct.

Trump, who pleaded not guilty, has been persistently dishonest about matters related to the indictment. Here is a fact check of some of the things he said in the Tuesday night address from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Trump and the Presidential Records Act

Trump claimed that the documents he had at Mar-a-Lago were “his own documents” and that he “had every right” to keep them under the Presidential Records Act.

Facts First: This is false. The Presidential Records Act says that all presidential records belong to the federal government the moment the president leaves office. By having official records at Mar-a-Lago after his presidency, Trump was in clear contravention of that law.

The key sentence from the Presidential Records Act is unequivocal: “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”

Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, said in a Sunday email: “Under the Presidential Records Act, not a single document pertaining to the official business of the White House – classified or unclassified – should have been carted off to Mar-A-Lago. President Trump might consider such records to be ‘his,’ but they are not.”

The Presidential Records Act and negotiation

Trump repeated his frequent claim that “according to the Presidential Records Act, which was a big deal, I was supposed to negotiate with NARA,” the National Archives and Records Administration, about the return of official documents after his presidency.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Again, the Presidential Records Act says that the moment a president leaves office, NARA gets custody and control of all presidential records from his administration. Nothing in the law says there should be a negotiation between a former president and NARA over a former president’s return of presidential documents – much less that there should have been a monthslong battle after NARA first contacted Trump’s team in 2021 to try to get some of the records that had not been handed over at the end of his presidency.

Baron, the former director of litigation at NARA, told CNN in a March 2023 email: “The former President is simply wrong as a matter of law. As of noon on January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, all presidential records of the Trump Administration came into the legal custody of the Archivist of the United States. Full stop. That means no presidential records ever should have been transferred to Mar-a-Lago, and there was no further talking or negotiating to be had.”

Timothy Naftali, a CNN presidential historian, New York University professor and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, described Trump’s claim as “nonsense” and said the former president’s description of the Presidential Records Act is “a matter of fantasy,” concocted to allow Trump to “pretend that he’s a victim.”

The law, Naftali said in March 2023, makes clear that documents Trump had at Mar-a-Lago are presidential records that legally belong to the public and are legally required to be in NARA’s custody. The law provides “no room for debates and discussions between presidential advisers and the National Archives at the end of a presidency” about such records, Naftali said.

In April 2023, the Society of American Archivists, a professional association, published its own fact check of Trump’s claim, saying it is “patently false.”

Trump served up a series of untrue claims about the probe itself, falsely accusing investigators of repeatedly taking steps that were either illegal or violated the Constitution.

He said last year’s FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home was unconstitutional. Investigators snapped a photo of some of the classified documents they found and, in Trump’s retelling, the FBI “released the picture illegally to the press.” He also claimed Smith’s team “lawlessly pierced my attorney-client privilege” by obtaining testimony and written evidence from his former lawyer, Evan Corcoran.

Facts First: Trump is wrong on all three fronts. The Mar-a-Lago search wasn’t unconstitutional, it was authorized by a judge who determined that prosecutors cleared the legal bar to conduct a search. The FBI didn’t release the photo “illegally;” they included it in a court filing – in a lawsuit that Trump himself initiated. And finally, prosecutors got a judge’s approval to lawfully obtain testimony from Corcoran.

Trump’s attorneys will likely mount additional challenges to the Corcoran evidence, but at this point in the case, there’s no evidence it was improperly obtained by Smith. The special counsel’s team convinced the chief judge of the DC federal court to order Corcoran to testify at the grand jury, arguing that attorney-client privilege didn’t apply because Trump was trying to commit a crime through Corcoran.

Other presidents and documents

Trump claimed that he is being charged under the Espionage Act for taking his “own” presidential documents, even though “just about every other president has done” the same.

Facts First: It’s not true that “just about every other president” has done what Trump has done, as the National Archives and Records Administration itself pointed out in a statement in 2022. No president since the Presidential Records Act took effect with President Ronald Reagan’s records in the 1980s has taken home troves of official documents or engaged in anything like Trump’s protracted post-presidency refusal to return official documents sought by NARA and the Justice Department.

Trump has previously made a more specific version of this claim, declaring that former presidents including Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush had all taken home millions of records. In reality, NARA was granted custody of their presidential records as soon as these presidents left office, as required by the Presidential Records Act, and it was NARA, not those presidents, that moved those documents out of the nation’s capital to NARA-managed temporary archival facilities near where their permanent presidential libraries would be built.

After Trump began making these false claims, NARA issued an October 2022 statement saying that it gained physical and legal custody of the records from Obama, the Bushes, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan “when those presidents left office.” It said of the temporary facilities to which the documents were moved: “All such temporary facilities met strict archival and security standards, and have been managed and staffed exclusively by NARA employees. Reports that indicate or imply that those Presidential records were in the possession of the former Presidents or their representatives, after they left office, or that the records were housed in substandard conditions, are false and misleading.”

In other words, there is no equivalence between Trump’s handling of presidential documents and those previous presidents.’ In Trump’s case, the presidential documents found in haphazard amateur storage at Mar-a-Lago, including documents marked as classified, were in Trump’s possession despite numerous attempts by both NARA and the Justice Department to get them back.

Trump baselessly accused special counsel Jack Smith of political bias, saying Smith “does political hit jobs” for a living and that “he’s a raging and uncontrolled Trump hater, as is his wife.”

Facts First: There is no public evidence that Smith is politically biased or a left-wing zealot. In fact, Smith was involved in previous Justice Department prosecutions against high-profile Democratic officeholders – which Trump even mentioned in his speech.

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said earlier Tuesday that “the record does not at all bear out this notion that Jack Smith is partisan or Democratic-leaning,” pointing out that Smith is a career official who has served under Democratic and Republican administrations since 1994.

Some of Trump’s unfounded attacks against Smith stem from the activities of his wife, filmmaker Katy Chevigny. Trump alluded to Chevigny on Tuesday night – and in many of his prior diatribes – calling her an “open Trump hater,” because she donated $2,000 to the Biden campaign in 2020, and was a producer for a Netflix documentary about former first lady Michelle Obama.

Smith himself is a registered independent and hasn’t donated to Democratic campaigns.

During his time at the Justice Department, specifically when he led the public integrity section, Smith prosecuted politicians from both parties, undercutting Trump’s previous claim that Smith has a “history of targeting conservatives.” But Honig pointed out on CNN earlier Tuesday that “the three biggest cases that Jack Smith was either involved in or oversaw as a supervisor, all were ultimately failures.”

Honig cited the prosecutions against John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, whose campaign finance case ended in a mistrial; former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, whose corruption convictions were unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court; and New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat whose corruption trial also ended in a mistrial.

Trump said the collapse of the cases against McDonnell and Edwards demonstrates that Smith’s prosecutions are unjustified.

Trump began the speech with an accusation that President Joe Biden is responsible for his indictment, saying that the president “had his top political opponent arrested on fake and fabricated charges” in the middle of a presidential election.

Facts First: This claim is not supported by any evidence. There is no sign that Biden has been involved in the decision to criminally investigate or prosecute Trump; ordinary citizens on a Florida grand jury voted to indict Trump, and the prosecution is led by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Smith was appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, but that is not proof that Biden was involved in the prosecution effort.

Biden said Friday that he had not spoken to Garland on the subject and was “not going to speak with him.”

As Trump has done repeatedly, he attacked Biden’s handling of official documents. He claimed that Biden took classified documents from his time as a senator and vice president – and then claimed, without explanation, that Biden “sent 1,850 boxes to the University of Delaware.”

Facts First: Trump’s context-free invocation of these Biden documents is highly misleading. The approximately 1,850 boxes that Biden legally and properly donated in 2012 to the University of Delaware are a collection of records from his 36 years in the US Senate. Unlike presidents, whose official records are property of the federal government under the Presidential Records Act, senators own their offices’ records and can do whatever they want with them – donate them to colleges as is standard, keep them at their homes, give them to journalists, even throw them in the trash. There is no current evidence that these boxes of Biden documents contain any classified documents.

Biden consented to two FBI searches at the university that did not initially appear to turn up any documents with classified markings, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN’s Paula Reid in February, though the papers were still being analyzed at the time.

Biden’s handling of classified documents is certainly open to criticism. Classified documents were discovered at his home in Delaware and in a former office of his, and he remains under a special counsel investigation. But there is nothing nefarious about him donating his Senate records to his alma mater.

Margaret Kwoka, a law professor at The Ohio State University and an expert on information law, said in a Friday email that “any comparison between congressional records and presidential records is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The legal requirements are entirely different between the two.”

You can read a longer fact check here about the repository of Biden’s Senate documents at the University of Delaware.

Speaking of these boxes at the University of Delaware, Trump said Biden “refuses to give them up and he refuses to let people even look at them. And then they say how he’s behaving so nicely.”

Facts First: This is highly misleading at best. Biden has consented to two FBI searches of his Senate papers at the University of Delaware. CNN reported in February that, according to a source familiar with the investigation, there was no initial indication that any of the documents were classified, though they were still being analyzed at the time.

It is not clear if Biden permitted the FBI to look at each and every one of the boxes of Senate papers at the university, or even if the FBI wanted to search all of those boxes; a spokesperson for Biden’s personal lawyer did not respond in early June to a CNN request for more information. But even with few details publicly known at present, it is clear that Trump’s broad declaration that Biden “refuses to let people even look at them” goes too far.

It is true that Biden’s Senate papers at the university are not yet publicly available; the university website says the boxes were delivered in mid-2012 but will require Biden’s consent to view until two years after Biden retires from public life. That restriction has frustrated some Biden critics, but it is certainly not a crime – and it is normal, as the Senate’s official website explains, for senators to donate papers to a home-state research institution with conditions about when they are to be released into the public realm.

Trump said he was the victim of a politicized Justice Department because he was indicted, while his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, didn’t face charges from her own classified documents scandal, stemming from her use of a private email server to conduct government business while she was secretary of state.

He claimed she had a “deliberate intention” of violating records retention laws and that “there’s never been obstruction as grave” as what she did to undermine her own FBI probe in 2015-2016. He also said, “Hillary Clinton broke the law, and she didn’t get indicted” because “the FBI and Justice Department protected her,” although there isn’t any evidence that their decision-making was tainted by politics.

Facts First: This is an inaccurate and self-serving comparison. Investigators saw problems with how both Trump and Clinton handled classified material, but there are several key differences between their cases. For starters, Trump mishandled far more material. Also, he was charged with knowingly breaking the law and obstructing the investigation, while the FBI concluded that Clinton didn’t act with criminal intent.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a CNN contributor who oversaw the Clinton email probe, explained how that was “very, very different” from Trump’s case in an interview Monday with CNN’s Dana Bash.

Investigators found 52 email chains on Clinton’s private server that contained references to information “that was later deemed to be classified,” McCabe said. Only eight of those chains mentioned “top secret” information, the highest level of classification. And the email chains did not have “stampings” on them that would’ve indicated at the time that the material was classified.

Compare that with Trump, who took more than 325 classified records to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including at least 60 “top secret” files. These were full documents with “headers and footers” and cover sheets “indicating they were some of the most classified materials we have,” McCabe said.

Another big difference is that Trump is facing six obstruction-related charges. Prosecutors say he conspired to defy a grand jury subpoena demanding the return of all classified documents, and that he misled his attorneys who were trying to comply with the subpoena.

Despite Trump’s claims in his speech, prosecutors never accused Clinton of undermining their probe. Clinton gave a voluntary interview to the FBI and she could have been prosecuted for lying if she made any false statements. The FBI later concluded that there was not “clear evidence” that Clinton “intended to violate laws,” and that charges weren’t warranted without any evidence of obstruction.

“Should it have happened? No,” McCabe said of Clinton’s private email server. “But what we didn’t have was evidence that Hillary Clinton had intentionally exchanged or withheld classified information.”

Trump brought up recent claims from congressional Republicans that new “evidence revealed that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe from Ukraine” and that “the FBI and the Justice Department don’t even want to talk about it.” He also claimed, with no proof, that Smith indicted him to distract from the story.

Facts First: Trump is overstating the known evidence about the supposed bribery scheme, and he falsely suggested the Justice Department is covering it up. The Justice Department didn’t ignore the allegation when it got the tip in 2020 – a Trump-appointed US attorney looked into the matter but wasn’t able to corroborate it, and referred it to another prosecutor for potential further review, according to previous CNN reporting.

In recent weeks, congressional Republicans have picked a fight with the FBI, demanding to see an internal document that they claim sheds light on the supposed Biden bribery scheme. The document, known as an FD-1023, describes an interview that FBI agents conducted in June 2020 with a known informant who was considered to be a trustworthy source.

The document isn’t public. But Republican lawmakers who reviewed it have said the FBI informant described a conversation with a Ukrainian national, who claimed that he paid $5 million to then-Vice President Biden in exchange for a desired policy outcome. CNN has reported that the FBI document doesn’t contain proof that the underlying allegation is true.

The Trump-appointed US attorney in Pittsburgh – who had been tasked by then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate dubious Ukraine-related tips coming from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani – looked into the bribery tip but couldn’t corroborate it, CNN has reported. That office then forwarded the material to the Trump-appointed US attorney in Delaware, who is still investigating the finances of the president’s son, Hunter Biden. (Hunter Biden denies wrongdoing.)

For his part, Joe Biden said last week the recent GOP allegations were “a bunch of malarkey,” though the White House has declined to comment further on the matter. A GOP-led Senate inquiry in 2020 didn’t find evidence that Biden abused his powers as vice president to help his family make money in Ukraine, where Hunter Biden had lucrative business dealings.

With the federal indictment of Donald Trump, the former U.S. president is doubling down on divisive rhetoric.

America is thus at the start of another depressing chapter of in a seemingly never-ending war of narratives. A June 7-10 CBS/YouGov poll found that only 38% of likely Republican voters view Trump’s mishandling of classified documents as a national-security risk, compared to 80% across other voter blocs.

Trump’s falsehoods about the case threaten to undermine public confidence in federal law enforcement, just as his insistence that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” undermined confidence in the integrity of America’s democratic process. Fortunately, shifts in public opinion about the 2020 election point to effective strategies for resisting attacks on core democratic institutions.