The day after Trump was arraigned in federal court in Miami on 37 counts, mostly involving the Espionage Act, he attended a campaign rally in New Jersey. At that rally, he dismissed the charges against him, which were based on his refusal to return documents to the National Archices, including some that were classified and top-secret. Trump ridiculed the case against him, asserting that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to take with him any documents he wanted. The ruling precedent, he claimed, was the “Clinton socks case,” which was dismissed by a judge.

“Under the Presidential Records Act — which is civil, not criminal — I had every right to have these documents,” Trump said, incorrectly describing the law that has no enforcement mechanism, and which is separate from the federal statutes Trump is actually charged under. “The crucial legal precedent is laid out in the most important case ever on this subject, known as the Clinton socks case.”

What was the Clinton socks case? I had never heard of it.

The Washington Post explained it a few days later.

First, the story pointed out, Trump’s reference to the Presidebtial Records Act as exculpatory for his actions was wrong. Did his lawyers tell him to say so or did he misinterpret what they told him?

Even before he pleaded not guilty on Tuesday, Trump and his legal team have argued that the Presidential Records Act gives the president the right to take any record upon leaving office and declare it personal. In reality, the 1981 law requiring White House documents to be preserved as property of the U.S. government was established, in part, so that presidents could not declare every record to be personal.

Second, his insistence on refusing to return classified documents bore no relation to the Clinton socks case.

When Clinton was elected, he reached out to a college classmate and friend who was a respected historian, Taylor Branch, and invited him to come to the White House periodically and tape record Clinton’s reflections on his presidency. Branch visited 79 times over the eight years of the Clinton presidency and taped their conversations as a running record of the Clinton presidency. He recorded their conversations on two cassette recorders. Clinton kept one set of the tapes, which he kept in his sock drawer.

In 2009, Taylor Branch published The Clinton Tapes, and he told the story of the socks drawer. The conservative organization Judicial Watch sued in 2010 to seek access to the tapes and to have them declared presidential records. A federal judge ruled in 2012 that the tapes were personal and were not presidential records.

A senior official at Jusicial Watch argued in an article in the Wall Street Journal that the Clinton tapes and Trump’s retention of government secrets were analogous.

Taylor Branch scoffed at the claim.

“Judicial Watch lost the case, and it was not a close case,” Branch said. Branch said “it’s amazing” that Trump’s team would cite the “failed case as a precedent for excusing Trump and how he handled classified government documents.”

Trump did not have the right to take classified documents home when he left the presidency. He did not have the power to declassify some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. He did have the right to refuse to return them when asked to do so or when ordered to do so. Nor did he have the right to hide them from his lawyers and the FBI. By taking home those documents, where they were not secure, he put at risk the lives of America’s troops and national security.

It’s quite a stretch to compare the tapes in Clinton’s socks drawer to the nondisclosure of classified documents.