WASHINGTON — Republican support for former President Donald Trump in the classified documents case against him is not unanimous.
A small but steady group says Trump should never have removed classified documents from the White House, the trigger for Trump’s federal indictment in Florida earlier this month.
“We don’t have a right to take top secret information to our home,” said Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., a member of the House Armed Service Committee, speaking on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
Referencing allegations in the federal indictment against Trump, Bacon said “you don’t show our attack plans on Iran to people who are not clear or documents that talk about our nuclear technology or where our intelligence resources are located throughout the world.”
Many of the Republican candidates running against Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination have also decried his alleged mishandling of classified documents, though some have questioned whether the government should have brought a federal case over the matter.
Trump’s Republican critics have accused the former president of acting selfishly and like he was still president.
In a Sunday tweet, Trump’s 2024 opponent Chris Christie said Trump “stole those boxes so he could play make believe at Mar-a-Lago.”
Trump, who still has the support of most Republicans on the documents indictment, has falsely said that the president has “the absolute right to take” documents and “keep them” or give them to the National Archives.
Federal regulations give the Archives control of presidential public papers, and lawmakers are not supposed to keep classified information with sensitive national security secrets.
Prosecutors have also accused Trump of trying to hide documents from a grand jury subpoena at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., the basis for obstruction of justice allegations against the former president.
