Former President Donald Trump repeated a false claim over the weekend during a rally in Nevada, accusing former President George H.W. Bush of taking presidential documents, in violation of the law, and storing them at a building used as both a bowling alley and a Chinese restaurant.
“George H.W. Bush took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant. They put them together. And it had a broken front door and broken windows. Other than that it was quite secure,” said Trump in Minden, Nevada on Saturday.
The former president also railed against “Barack Hussein Obama” who Trump wrongly claimed “moved more than 20 truckloads, over 33 million pages of documents, both classified and unclassified, to a poorly built and totally unsafe former furniture store located in a rather bad neighborhood in Chicago with no security, by the way.”
Moreover, Trump laid in both former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, saying:
George W Bush stored 68 million pages in a warehouse in Texas and lost 22 million White House emails. He lost 22 million e-mails. Can you imagine if I lost two emails that say, this is terrible, it must have been nuclear in those two. Covering the Iraq invasion.
Bill Clinton took millions of documents from the White House to a former car dealership in Arkansas. We love Arkansas. I can tell you. We won Arkansas both times also and kept classified recordings in his sock drawer. In fact, he supposedly put the information from the White House into his socks and left the White House with the information. So we call it the sock case. If I did that, there’d be major trouble
Trump’s comments closely mirrored a segment from late September by Fox News host Jesse Watters who ran through almost the exact same criticism of the former presidents, with one major difference.
“Let’s start with President George H.W. Bush. His presidential records ended up in a strip mall, a store that used to house a bowling alley, and a Chinese restaurant where bowling shoes co-mingled with top-secret documents? I don’t know. I’m not a national security expert,” Watters said.
“But if your storage room shares a parking lot with a Chili’s and a JCPenney, is that secure? Who’s to say?” He added. There is, of course, a key difference between Trump’s and Watters’s allegations, Watters does not imply that the other former presidents “took” the documents on their own.
“Then there’s Bill Clinton. Where did he store his records other than his sock drawer? Secret underground bunker, a remote military base? Nope. He sent his records to an abandoned car dealership in Little Rock, Arkansas. I’m sure Slick Willie had his fun in the back of a few Oldsmobiles, but it doesn’t seem like the perfect place to store classified docs,” Watters continued, adding:
What about George W Bush? He’s stored millions of documents at some warehouse in Texas. Bush had an army of trucks and planes bringing them across the country. They even had thousands of artifacts like Saddam Hussein’s nine-millimeter glock.
What about Obama? He’s never done anything wrong. He must have had top-notch security at his facility. This is where he secured his documents. What’s this building? Well, it is a defunct furniture store. Right across the street from a McDonald’s. That’ll definitely keep the Russians out. Look at that. Why a furniture store? Did Obama have his aides hide documents under mattresses while he and Michelle shop for a new couch?
“Mar-A-Lago is a fortress crawling with Secret Service agents. All of a sudden, Trump sounds like he’s handled records more responsibly than any president in the last 30 years,” concluded Watters. Trump shared the segment on his Truth Social, writing, “This is the real story on the Document Hoax — check it out!”
CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checked Trump’s claims. Dale began with the claim regarding H.W. Bush and noted in a lengthy Twitter thread, “This is a dishonest claim. The truth: *the National Archives* sorted Bush docs for his library in a heavily secured facility (patrols, cameras, sensors) that happened to be a former alley/restaurant.”
Here’s a 1994 article about the Archives’ work with Bush documents in the secure facility that happened to be a former bowling alley/restaurant. Trump made it sound like Bush himself had carelessly taken docs to an alley/restaurant. https://t.co/7DwNnyk25h pic.twitter.com/Cd3XFgJ119
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 10, 2022
“As with Obama docs the Archives took to Chicago, Bush didn’t take them himself,” Dale added.
Trump also said at the rally that Bill Clinton took millions of documents to a former car dealership.
This is false in the exact same way as the claims about Obama and Bush: *the National Archives* took the docs to the ex-dealership for temporary storage. https://t.co/Lkljzctxc1 pic.twitter.com/QpQF8lMG8r
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 10, 2022
“Trump also said at the rally that Bill Clinton took millions of documents to a former car dealership,” Dale continued, concluding:
This is false in the exact same way as the claims about Obama and Bush: *the National Archives* took the docs to the ex-dealership for temporary storage.
So while it is true that H.W. Bush did temporarily store documents at a bowling alley, the key difference between reality and what Trump claimed is that it all happened under the purview of the federal government and the National Archives.
While Watters laid the groundwork for Trump’s claim, he never suggested Bush or any of the former presidents illegally took the documents, despite the heavy insinuation of wrongdoing. In fact, it has become standard practice that presidential documents are stored in random, often low-cost facilities while a president’s library is under construction and exhibits are being prepared.
“When will they investigate and prosecute Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, and look into what took place with George Bush’s father, a very nice man,” concluded Trump during his rally. “And what about Barack Hussein Obama?”
“Are they under potential prosecution? I don’t think so, I don’t think they are,” Trump added – a comment, given the facts, actually makes a whole lot of sense.
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