The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August for classified documents that Trump was thought to have improperly removed from the White House. The search was not illegal and occurred after the Justice Department obtained a warrant.

WHAT WAS SAID

“And now this massive election interference at a scale never seen before in our country, beginning with the radical left George Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg of New York.”

This needs context. The links between Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who has brought the case against Trump, and George Soros, the financier and Democratic donor, are real but overstated. (Attacks that portray Soros as a “globalist” mastermind often veer into antisemitic tropes.)

In reality, Soros donated to a liberal group that endorses progressive prosecutors and supports efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system, in line with causes that he has publicly supported for years. That group used a significant portion of the money, but not all of it, to support Bragg in his 2021 campaign.

A spokesman for Soros said that the two men had never met and that Soros had not given money directly to Bragg’s campaign.

WHAT WAS SAID

“That has absolutely nothing to do with openly taking boxes of documents and mostly clothing and other things to my home, which President Obama has done.”

False. Trump has repeatedly and wrongly compared his handling of classified documents to that of his predecessor.

After his presidency, Trump took a trove of classified documents, including 18 marked as top secret, to Mar-a-Lago.

In contrast, the National Archives and Records Administration, which preserves and maintains records after a president leaves office, has said in a statement that former President Barack Obama turned over his documents, classified and unclassified, as required by law.

The agency has also said it is not aware of any missing boxes of presidential records from the Obama administration.

WHAT WAS SAID

“In fact, they seem to have forgotten about his documents entirely, so many, thousands and thousands. It’s OK with him. They like to say that I’m obstructing, which I’m not, because I was working with NARA very nicely until the raid on my home. Biden is obstructing by making it impossible to get the 1,850 boxes.”

False. Trump is again drawing an inaccurate comparison between his and President Joe Biden’s improper handling of classified documents.

The Justice Department appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of documents in January, two months after the initial discovery of classified material at an office he had used at a Washington think tank. So clearly the matter was not “forgotten,” nor was Biden given an “OK.”

Officials at the National Archives and Records Administration might also disagree with Trump’s assertion that he was cooperating “very nicely” with archivists responsible for storing and accounting for his presidential records. NARA asked Trump to return documents in spring 2021 once it had discovered files were missing and received them only after months of asking.

As for Biden’s 1,850 boxes, that was referring to a collection of documents he had donated to the University of Delaware in 2012 from his tenure as a senator representing the state from 1973 to 2009. Unlike presidential documents, which must be released to NARA once a president leaves office, documents from members of Congress are not covered by the Presidential Records Act. It is not uncommon for senators and representatives to give such items to research or historical facilities.

The university agreed to not give the public access to Biden’s documents from his time as senator until two years after he retired from public life. But the FBI did search the collection in February as part of the special counsel investigation and in cooperation with Biden’s legal team. The New York Times reported at the time that the material was still being analysed but did not appear to contain any classified documents.

WHAT WAS SAID

“I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris.”

This needs context. Loren Merchan, the daughter of the judge presiding over the case, is the president and a partner at a digital campaign strategy agency that has done work for many prominent Democrats, including the 2020 campaigns of Biden and Kamala Harris, who went on to become Biden’s vice-president. Earlier on Tuesday, Trump argued that Justice Juan Merchan should recuse himself because of her work, but experts in judicial ethics agreed that this was not adequate grounds for recusal.

Under New York state rules on judicial conduct, a judge should disqualify himself or herself from a case if a relative within the sixth degree had “an interest that would be substantially affected by the proceeding”. Merchan’s work on Democratic campaigns does not give her enough of an interest that would qualify, experts said.

“Political interests are widely shared and thus diffused,” said Arthur Hellman, a professor emeritus of law at the University of Pittsburgh. “If this kind of work by a relative within the sixth degree were enough to require recusal, it would be hard to find any judge who could hear the case.”