FactChecking Trump’s Remarks at the Faith & Freedom Coalition Conference
In June 24 remarks, former President Donald Trump made misleading claims about the reach of the National Archives and Records Administration and the federal charges he is facing for allegedly retaining classified documents after he was no longer in office. Trump also made an unsubstantiated claim about President Joe Biden.
- Trump complained that charging him for alleged Espionage Act violations is an “outrageous and vicious” legal argument because he’s not a spy. But other individuals who weren’t alleged to be spies have been convicted of violating the same section of that federal law concerning the willful retention of national defense information.
- Trump accurately quoted from a January New York Times article that said the National Archives can’t on its own enforce a request that a former president return presidential records to the government. What he left out was the part of the article that said NARA can refer suspected violations of law to the Department of Justice, as it did in Trump’s case.
- He also said that an IRS whistleblower “revealed that crooked Joe [Biden] sat in a room while his son Hunter messaged a Chinese Communist Party official” about money. But IRS agents told Congress in May that it hadn’t been established that Biden was with his son, as Hunter Biden claimed in a July 2017 WhatsApp message.
Trump made those in Washington, D.C., where he spoke for roughly 90 minutes.
