Donald Trump Jr. now claims it would probably be a “good” thing if his father, a private citizen living at a resort in Florida, was still holding on to the nuclear codes.
“By the way, for the record, I’d say that if Donald Trump actually still had the nuclear codes, it’d probably be good,” he said Monday at a campaign event for Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
“Our enemies might actually be like, ‘OK, maybe let’s not mess with them,’ unlike when they look at Joe Biden and they say, ‘You know what? We should attack now.’”
Donald Trump and his allies have produced a rotation of sometimes-contradictory excuses since the FBI searched the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Aug. 8 and removed boxes of documents, some of which reportedly included classified materials.
The search warrant revealed the FBI was investigating Trump for a potential violation of the Espionage Act.
In the wake of the search, Trump baselessly accused to FBI of planting evidence at his home and called reports he may have had documents pertaining to nuclear weapons a “hoax.”
He has also since argued he was allowed to take sensitive materials to Mar-a-Lago because he had a “standing order” to declassify any documents he took from the Oval Office to his White House residence ― a claim many of his own former top advisers have labeled absurd and false.
On Monday, Trump filed suit against the U.S. government over the search, seeking to stop Department of Justice authorities from reading the materials until a third-party court official can be appointed to review the documents and determine if any should be returned to him because they’re protected by attorney-client or executive privilege.