In his statement on the charges against Mr. Trump, Mr. Grassley said, “The law is the law, and it must be enforced no matter which party is involved.” He added that he believed the National Archives at the time were “less inclined” to involve the Justice Department in recovering Ms. Clinton’s emails.
“But now, after the archives were able to recover presidential data, it looks like it wants to penetrate the Justice Department,” he said.
Jason Chaffetz, a former Utah Republican congressman who chaired extensive investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s emails as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in an interview Thursday that the two situations were different. Ms. Clinton, he said, had set up a “convenient arrangement” where she would store State Department communications on a private server, in violation of agency policies.
In the case of the former president, Mr. Chaffetz said, he needed to know more about what, in particular, Mr. Trump had taken from the White House, and whether there were duplicate or digital copies of what Mr. the toilet or torn. When asked about detailed news reports, Mr Chaffetz said this behavior “not necessarily” amounted to record destruction.
“I believe in the sanctity of federal documents,” Mr. Chaffetz said, “but you’ll have to come up with specific cases.”
In a text message, Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said Mr. Trump had partnered with the National Archives “to preserve documents that he could have kept as personal effects if he had wanted to.”
Several former Trump White House officials, who regularly attacked Ms. Clinton, had no say in Mr Trump’s decision to take documents to Mar-a-Lago.
