Trump: 'Obama kept 33 million pages of documents'

President Donald Trump asked on Thursday "what happened to the 30 million pages of documents taken from the White House to Chicago by Barack Hussein Obama? He refused to give them back!"

He continued: "This act was strongly at odds with NARA (National Archives and Records Administration). Will they be breaking into Obama's 'mansion' in Martha's Vineyard."

In a press release on Friday, Trump said: "President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!"

According to PBS: "The Obama administration in its final year in office spent a record $36.2 million on legal costs defending its refusal to turn over federal records under the Freedom of Information Act, according to an Associated Press analysis of new U.S. data that also showed poor performance in other categories measuring transparency in government."

"For a second consecutive year, the Obama administration set a record for times federal employees told citizens, journalists and others that despite searching they couldn’t find a single page of files that were requested.

"And it set records for outright denial of access to files, refusing to quickly consider requests described as especially newsworthy, and forcing people to pay for records who had asked the government to waive search and copy fees," they wrote.

In an opinion piece written for the New York Post by author James Bovard, he noted several other former presidents that have taken years, if not decades, to return documents and tapes covered under the Presidential Records Act.

The Presidential Records Act, which states that "The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records," has come into the spotlight after FBI agents raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence under the suspicion that he has held onto documents covered under this act.

Speaking with BBC Newshour, Professor Benjamin Hufbauer said that it could take around 100 years to fully process all these records from the Obama administration.