What WAS Said

“President Obama, from what they tell me, was under a similar kind of a thing, didn’t give one letter. They didn’t do anything. They didn’t give one letter of the request. Many requests were made. They didn’t give a letter.”

— President Trump, at the White House on Tuesday

False.

Republicans took control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections and opened a number of investigations into the Obama administration. While Mr. Obama did invoke executive privilege in at least one instance, Mr. Trump is wrong that his predecessor did not turn over any documents at all.

One of the first controversies that drew scrutiny from Republicans in Congress was Operation Fast and Furious, a botched federal gun-trafficking case. Mr. Trump may have been referring to Mr. Obama’s assertion of executive privilege over some 1,300 pages of documents related to the case. A federal judge ruled against the Obama administration in 2016. Beyond the batch of documents covered by the court ruling, congressional investigators obtained more than 10,000 pages of additional material, including nearly 7,000 from the Justice Department after subpoenas.

From February 2011 to August 2012, a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigated Solyndra, a solar-power company that received $527 million in government loans and declared bankruptcy. The final report faulted the Obama administration for delaying the document-gathering process, but still obtained over 300,000 pages of documents from the White House, federal agencies and Solyndra and its counsel.

Congress opened more than half a dozen investigations into the State Department’s handling of the attacks on American facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012. The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which conducted the longest-lasting inquiry, said in its December 2016 final report that it began with 50,000 pages of documents — though it said half of them were useless — and obtained an additional 75,000 pages of new material, including 1,450 pages from the White House.