Donald Trump accused former president George HW Bush of hiding classified documents in a “bowling alley” during a rally in Arizona on Sunday.
Mr Trump claimed that many former presidents had stored millions of pages of documents in warehouses “with damaged main doors”.
The former president said that senior Bush “took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant”.
“They put them together. And it had a broken front door and broken windows. Other than that it was quite secure,” Mr Trump added.
In fact, he even demanded to know why the former president was not prosecuted for “hiding” documents.
Mr Trump himself is currently under investigation for taking government documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The US Department of Justice found 48 documents marked classified at his estate after the FBI conducted a search in August. The department suggested that Mr Trump could be holding many other classified documents.
Mr Trump’s reference to a bowling alley where Bush, according to him, hid classified documents was a likely referrance to reports from 1994 about the site of a future George Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. The Presidential Library and Museum was being considered in an old bowling alley and some of it was part of the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant.
The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The Bush Library and Museum’s archives hold more than 40 million pages of official records and personal papers documenting the life of the 41st president of the United States.
The website of the presidential library and museum mentions that the “presidential records of George Bush (1989-1993) comprise the core of the archival holdings. The library also contains the vice presidential records of both George Bush (1981-1989) and Dan Quayle (1989-1993) as well as donated historical materials that document George Bush’s private and public career”.
In addition to these records, the Bush Library has an extensive audiovisual collection containing more than two million photographs and 10,000 videotapes.
Mr Trump’s accusation that Bush hid the documents is rooted in the story of how the Bush library and museum came into being in the first place.
It was in an old bowling alley, that things from the former president’s life were gathered. In 1994, when the future museum and library were coming together, a news agency reported that stuff like “an old infielder’s mitt, the door of a Kuwaiti palace, even a huge likeness of Bush’s head from a Republican convention” were brought to the bowling alley.
Currently, the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum contains more than 100,000 artefacts in its three-dimensional holdings, housed and preserved for posterity, research and exhibit, the website notes.
The bowling alley was apparently not enough for the millions of pages of documents, so some of the documents were kept next door to the bowling alley in what used to be the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant.
All the stuff for the future library and museum at the time was not just from the Bush presidency years, but other items came from his eight years as vice president as well. Many also were from his tenure as a Texas congressman.
The documents and memorabilia were all guarded by security at the future Bush library. At the time Associated Press reported that some of the “printed material is classified” and will remain so for years and that “it is open only to those with top-secret clearances.”
At the time when the National Archives was just setting up the library and the museum, the director of the Center of Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University, George Edwards said: “We’re not just taking a presidential library and saying, ‘Gee, isn’t this pretty and prestigious’. We want to integrate the library into the intellectual life of the campus.”
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s comment about Bush and the bowling alley drew a sharp response on Twitter from Bush’s son, Jeb Bush. “I am so confused,” he said: “My dad enjoyed a good Chinese meal and enjoyed the challenge of 7 10 split. What the heck is up with you?”