Facing a criminal investigation over alleged election interference in Georgia, Donald Trump made comments at his town hall event this week that might’ve helped prosecutors. Facing a criminal investigation over the Jan. 6 attack, the former president admitted at the same event that he tried to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to help him overturn the 2020 election results. He also seemed to invite new civil litigation from E. Jean Carroll.
But it was the Republican’s comments about his classified documents scandal that continue to reverberate in the wake of the ridiculous broadcast.
At one point during the event, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump whether he ever showed the classified documents he took to anyone. “Not really,” he replied. Asked what that meant, the former president added, “Not that I can think of.”
It was hard not to imagine his defense attorneys smacking their foreheads. As a New York Times report put it, this was “the area in which he walked himself into the biggest problems.” A separate Times report added overnight:
Former President Donald J. Trump admitted more directly than before on Wednesday that he knowingly removed government records from the White House and claimed that he was allowed to take anything he wanted with him as personal records, appearing to misstate the law and undercut some assertions by his own lawyers.
A related NBC News report noted that Trump’s lawyers told Congress last month that the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago compound got there by accident. And yet, there was Trump during the CNN program, declaring, “I took the documents; I’m allowed to,” before lying about his predecessors having done the same thing.
He went on to insist he had an “absolute” right to take the materials from the White House based on an interpretation of the Presidential Records Act that doesn’t really make any sense. The Times added:
At another point, Mr. Trump described for Ms. Collins how he had…
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