Trump can’t get his story straight, not that he needs to.
It’s not surprising that Donald Trump’s latest effort to deflect criticism over his possession of White House documents at Mar-a-Lago was routed through writer John Solomon. Solomon has for years been a favored conduit for Trump-friendly confirmation. His intermingled relationship with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani helped propel the rhetoric that Trump used as a defense in his first impeachment trial — rhetoric that was later debunked. Trump trusts Solomon to document the investigation into Russian interference, which says a lot.
So it was Solomon, too, who on Friday night was fed the new rationale for why it was A-okay for Trump to retain a document cache near the swimming pool at his resort. During an interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Solomon read a statement that Trump’s team had sent him.
“As we can all relate to, everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time,” Solomon read. “American presidents are no different. President Trump, in order to prepare the work for the next day, often took documents, including classified documents, to the residence. He 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.”
Solomon later wrote an article about this claim for his bespoke website. In that article — probably unintentionally — he revealed one of the two flaws with this argument: that there’s no evidence it’s true. Sean Hannity, you may not be surprised to hear, did not spend a lot of time testing its credibility on air; it seems unlikely that he will opt to clarify the reality during his show Monday evening.
The other flaw, of course, is that this assertion about a standing order is largely irrelevant to the legal question at hand.
The “can” question has been the subject of some significant chatter since the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago one week ago, a discussion that has made clear how the rigors of the classification system — like so much else in government — rely on norms of executive behavior that Trump often disregarded.
