The Hill reports:

Former Attorney General Bill Barr called arguments being made by Republicans attempting to compare former President Trump’s handling of classified documents to previous presidents “big lies.”

Barr was asked by “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream to respond to comparisons of Trump leaving the White House with classified documents to former Presidents Clinton and Obama, and President Biden when he was vice president.

Barr said that the difference is that other presidents worked with the National Archives to store those documents, unlike Trump who faces obstruction of justice charges over trying to keep from handing the records back over to the federal government.

“So, there are two big lies, I think, that are out there right now,” Barr said. “One is all these other presidents took all these documents. Those were situations where they arranged with the archives to set up special space under the management, control, and security provided by the archivists to temporarily put documents until the libraries were ready. These were not people just putting them in their basement, OK.”

The second lie, according to Barr, is the notion that a president has “complete authority” to declare any document “personal.”

“It’s facially ridiculous. That opinion had to do with the distinction between official records, which are records prepared by government agencies for the purpose of government action, and personal documents, as opposed to official documents, which are things prepared by the President, such as a diary or notes, which are not used in the government’s deliberations,” Barr said. [Continue reading…]