In former President Donald Trump’s first extended response to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Friday announcement that he had appointed a special counsel to oversee the criminal investigation into Trump’s retention of government documents after he left office, Trump defended himself with dishonesty – repeating his false and thoroughly debunked claims about how other ex-presidents handled official records.

Trump, speaking Friday night at a gala at his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence, asked why there is not an investigation into “all of the other presidents that preceded me,” including but not limited to Republicans George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He claimed that these previous presidents “kept documents,” and he continued: “In one case, they had it in a Chinese restaurant with broken windows. And in another case they had a Chinese restaurant connected to a bowling alley. This is where the documents were kept. They took documents with them. President Obama took documents.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are, again, false – and they have been debunked by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) itself. As NARA explained in an August statement, Barack Obama did not take the presidential documents Trump claimed Obama had taken. Rather, NARA itself moved documents from the Obama administration to a NARA-managed facility in the Chicago area, near where Obama’s presidential library is being built. NARA similarly explained in a statement in October, after Trump added other past presidents to the baseless narrative, that neither of the Bushes took the documents Trump claimed they had taken. Again, it was NARA that took the Bushes’ presidential documents to facilities that NARA managed near the future locations of their presidential libraries.