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By Fatma Khaled
Staff Writer
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Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who served during the Trump administration, criticized Donald Trump's arguments about keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
The former president is facing 37 federal charges over his alleged mishandling of classified documents that he took with him when he left the White House in January 2021. In its investigation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said Trump took the sensitive material to Mar-a-Lago, his private residence in Florida, and obstructed governmental efforts to return the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Trump, meanwhile, pleaded not guilty to the charges in a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday and has maintained his innocence throughout the DOJ's probe.
Trump previously justified his actions of keeping the documents as he argued that he has "done everything right" under the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which was enacted in 1978 after former President Richard Nixon resigned. The PRA stipulates that presidential records belong to the U.S. government and not the president, and therefore should be preserved. The law outlines the requirements for the maintenance, access, and preservation of information during a president's tenure as well as after they leave office.
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Barr was asked during an interview on CBS News' Face the Nation on Sunday about whether or not he thinks Trump is "mischaracterizing" the law by claiming that he has privileges and rights under the PRA.
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"Absolutely. The legal theory by which he gets to take battle plans and sensitive national security information, as his personal papers, is absurd. It's just as wacky as the legal doctrine they came up with for having the vice president unilaterally determine who won the election," he said.
The former attorney general continued: "The whole purpose of the statute, the Presidential Records Act, is was to stop presidents from taking official documents out of the White House. It was passed after Watergate, that's the whole purpose of it. And therefore it restricted what a president can take."
Under the PRA, documents that must be preserved include records related to certain political activities and president's duties such emails, text messages, and phone records, but it doesn't include the president's personal records or documents of a "purely private or nonpublic character."
"Presidential records are records in the White House relating to the constitutional, statutory or other official or ceremonial duties of the president," Jason R. Baron, the former director of litigation at the NARA, told CBS News last August. "Personal records such as diaries, journals or other personal notes that are not prepared or used or communicated for government business are excluded from the definition of what constitutes a presidential record."
The federal indictment against the former president mentioned that the boxes recovered from Mar-a-Lago included "newspapers, press clippings, letters, notes, cards, photographs, official documents, and other materials." However, the PRA requires the president to separate personal documents from presidential records before leaving office.
"Obviously, these [Trump's classified] documents are not purely private, it's obvious and they're not even now arguing that it's purely private, [but] what they're saying is that the President just has sweeping discretion to say they are, even though they squarely don't fall within the definition. It's an absurd argument," Barr added on Sunday.
Newsweek reached out by email to Trump's media office for comment.
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