Donald Trump wrote what appears to be a panicked post on his Truth Social account Thursday morning, attacking his detractors, pointing to what he claims are the “hoaxes” perpetrated against him, and concluding that the press, he says, “is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done!”
Trump is known for attaching negative nicknames to his opponents but has rarely used the term “the Sleaze” before. When he has it generally has been about Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which does not seem to make much sense in this context.
A plain reading of Trump’s remarks (below) would lead some to think he is afraid of being indicted.
While NCRM generally does not publish the former president’s remarks in full, we are this time so readers can have as clear an understanding of them, in context, as possible.
“Even though I am as innocent as a person can be, and despite MY campaign being spied on by the Radical Left, the FISA COURT being lied to and defrauded, all of the many Hoaxes and Scams that were illegally placed on me by very sick & demented people, and without even mentioning the many crimes of Joe and Hunter Biden, all revealed in great detail in the Laptop From Hell, it looks more and more like the Fake News Media is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done!”
In other posts Thursday Trump has screamed, “PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT!” and “The Justice Department and FBI are “leaking” at levels never seen before – and I did nothing wrong!!!”
He also appears to be taking the position, one which some experts have argued is wrong, that he is protected by the Presidential Records Act, and has recently suggested that he, as a former president, still has powers afforded to the sitting president.
Calls have grown in recent weeks for Trump to be indicted over reports that he allegedly held 700 pages of documents with classified markings, and refused to return them all to the National Archives, forcing NARA and DOJ at different times to retrieve them, including most recently by the FBI executing a search warrant.
Recent headlines also support a plain reading of Trump’s remarks that point to him appearing to be panicking over calls for him to be indicted, and predictions that he will be.
Trump’s representative to the National Archives, John Solomon, published a letter written by the Acting National Archivist that was anything but exculpatory for Trump.
It revealed multiple instances of the federal government, mostly DOJ, requesting the return of what we now know were 35 cartons of White House records. Those requests included a trip to Mar-a-Lago by top DOJ officials, which resulted in an in-person meeting with Trump and his attorneys, and four DOJ investigators, “including Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section at the Justice Department,” as CNN had reported.
News reports also reveal Trump told multiple aides the White House records, including, presumably, the classified documents, were his property, as The New York Times revealed.
“It’s not theirs; it’s mine,” he said repeatedly.