Former U.S. President Donald Trump claims that he took only folders for classified documents as “a cool keepsake” and accused Trump-hating feds of planting top secret documents to frame him.

Mr Trump sought to downplay the scandal surrounding his taking hundreds of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago by focusing on the scores of empty folders found by FBI agents in an August 8 search.

“These were ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them but they were a cool keepsake,” Mr Trump wrote in a post on his social media site. “Perhaps the Gestapo took some of these empty folders when they Raided Mar-a-Lago, & counted them as a document, which they are not.”

Without offering any evidence, Mr Trump said Trump-hating Marxist thugs might be planting more documents while the folders were in the hands of federal prosecutors.

He also tried to change the subject to the discovery of classified documents at President Joe Biden’s home and office, a scandal that has jolted the White House in recent days.

“They keep saying I had a large number of documents in order to make the Biden Classified Docs look less significant,” added the former U.S. president.

“As president, I did nothing wrong. JOE DID,” Mr Trump insisted.

Federal investigators said Mr Trump fought tooth and nail to hold onto a trove of thousands of government documents and presidential records that he improperly took when he left the White House.

Mr Trump also defied a subpoena for the return of all classified documents, prompting the search that turned up more than 300 classified documents at his oceanfront resort.

In Mr Biden’s case, his lawyers immediately informed the feds when they found a small number of classified documents stored at an office the president once used last November.

They later launched a more extensive search, which turned up two more sets of documents at Mr Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. Special counsel Jack Smith is mulling whether to file charges against Mr Trump while special counsel Robert Hur is probing the Biden documents case. 

(dpa /NAN)