The following editorial originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
After the FBI search for classified records at former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, his chorus of sycophants kept singing the same tune: The search was unnecessary. The government should have just asked him to return the documents. Trump had declassified them anyway.
But new court filings devastate each of those arguments. The public should insist that those who lambasted law enforcement in their eagerness to defend Trump before any facts were known explain where they stand now.
Immediately after Trump announced Aug. 8 that his Mar-a-Lago resort was “under siege, raided and occupied” by the FBI, the usual suspects leapt to his defense.
These and other Republican responses were unleashed before there was virtually any information available about the peaceful, court-approved search (not “raid” or “siege”). Their rhetoric may well have contributed to a rash of death threats against FBI officials. So much for the “law and order” party.
The timeline that has since emerged via court filings has increasingly vindicated the FBI’s search. That Trump took hundreds of classified documents with him when he left office — including some with classifications indicating they could endanger national security if they fell into the wrong hands — is now beyond dispute.
Far from overreacting, federal officials spent almost two years requesting, negotiating and even subpoenaing Trump to get the records, finally resorting to a court-ordered search as a last resort. Trump’s narrative that they could’ve just asked is almost comical in hindsight.
Trump’s unsupported claim that he declassified the records before he took them is one that his attorneys never made during all the negotiating, exposing it as an after-the-fact contrivance. And recent court filings indicate Trump’s attorneys may have moved documents to prevent federal officials from finding them, which boosts the case for obstruction of justice.
Trump himself may have inadvertently provided evidence of such obstruction, by complaining on social media that the FBI “threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending that it was me that did it!).” Spreading out documents to photograph them is standard evidentiary procedure.
More to the point, Trump didn’t deny the documents were in his home — claiming only that they weren’t on the floor. Yet his lawyers had previously denied there were still documents anywhere on the premises.
The fact that several Republican candidates have recently scrubbed their social media of posts defending Trump indicates at least some in the party have reconsidered their knee-jerk defense of a president who has demonstrated again and again his contempt for the rule of law. The rest should be asked, at every opportunity, whether they agree.
