Former President Donald Trump is facing criminal prosecution by Special Counsel Jack Smith over his alleged unlawful retention of classified documents after he left the White House in January 2021.
Yet, in a Wednesday interview, Trump insisted that he "legally" retained the classified documents in his possession under the authority of the Presidential Records Act and "wasn't hiding them" from federal investigators, Breitbart reported.
Trump also highlighted the substantial disparity in treatment between himself and President Joe Biden, in that he is being aggressively prosecuted for keeping classified documents while Biden, who was also found to possess without authorization numerous classified documents from his time as vice president and senator, is not facing any criminal charges.
"I was dealing with them. We were dealing fine. And then all of a sudden they raided this house. They raided Mar-a-Lago. These are corrupt people," former President Trump told Newsmax host Greg Kelly during an interview Wednesday in his South Florida resort residence.
"But they release Biden. What Biden did, he wasn’t protected by the Presidential Records [Act] because he wasn’t president. He took them when he was a senator," Trump continued.
As reported last month by NBC News, Biden was found to have numerous classified documents dating from his time as a senator and vice president, which he had no authority to keep, that were stored in several different unsecured locations, including the garage of his Delaware home and an unused office space in Washington D.C., among other places.
However, following an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Hur, it was determined that even though Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials" to others without authorization, which "present serious risks to national security," he would not face criminal charges due to the belief that a D.C. jury would feel sympathetic toward the "elderly man with a poor memory" and refuse to convict him.
"There’s something going on because they’re going after me viciously," Trump told Kelly in the Newsmax interview, per Mediaite. "Then all of a sudden it comes out that Biden took 10 times the number of documents that I did."
"And I took them very legally and I wasn’t hiding them. We had boxes on the front of the -- and a lot of those boxes had clothing and a lot," he continued about his leaving the White House. "We’re moving out, ok? Unfortunately, we’re moving out of the White House. And because we’re moving out of the White House, our country’s going to hell."
"But we weren’t hiding anything," Trump said, per Breitbart. "He was, and then you see him in with his Corvette. Nobody ever mentions the one though that’s the worst, is he had them in Chinatown, and those were boxes that were used. If you take a look at those boxes, those boxes were -- there was a lot of activity in those boxes, they show pictures of them. These were boxes that were used.
"In Mar-a-Lago, we had the Secret Service, we had all sorts of security. We had everything. And what he did was far more egregious," the former president stated. "I mean, I had protection, I had the right to do it -- in my opinion, and my lawyers' opinion and everything else."
"But when you see the way they released him, and they say we're gonna release him, it was egregious what he did," Trump said while also mentioning how his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton similarly dodged accountability for her own scandalous retention and destruction of classified materials on an unauthorized and improperly secured private email server.
"So, when I look at this, Greg, I say there's gotta be something. You know, it's very interesting when they were going after me viciously, raiding my house, everything else -- because Jack Smith is an animal," Trump told Kelly, according to Mediaite. "He's a total animal. He's a -- he's deranged. He really is, he's a deranged person."
"The other gentleman," Special Counsel Hur, "who went after Biden, it was a weird kind of a conclusion because he said he's competent to be president but he's not competent to stand trial," Trump concluded. "That's sort of a strange thing. I don't think people are going to buy that very much, because certainly it'll be used during the campaign."
