As the dust settles on Donald Trump’s new, superseding indictment in the classified documents scandal, the former president continues to search for some kind of talking point that might help him. This morning, he turned to a familiar rhetorical line.
“Why was Hillary Clinton allowed to delete 33,000 emails, many of them Classified, AFTER getting a Subpoena from Congress?” Trump wrote on his social media platform, using his idiosyncratic approach to capitalization.
At this point, we could spend a few sentences explaining why these stale allegations against the former secretary of state are baseless, but let’s instead turn our attention to the more salient point: If there’s one person Trump should avoid talking about right now, it’s his 2016 rival.
To be sure, as the Republican’s classified documents scandal has intensified, Clinton’s name has come up quite a bit. To hear the GOP tell it, the Democrat faced effectively the same accusations, and since she wasn’t criminally charged, Trump shouldn’t be either. Nearly a year ago, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham went so far as to tell a national television audience, “If there is a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”
This has never made any sense, because Clinton did not, in reality, do the same thing.
But what’s especially interesting about the parallels is that they’re not entirely irrelevant. In fact, there’s an angle to this discussion that matters a great deal:
- Trump, his party, and much of the political press accused Clinton of mishandling classified information and engaging in a cover-up.
- As things now stand, Trump stands accused of allegedly mishandling classified information and engaging in a cover-up.
Or put another way, for the former president to bring up the former secretary of state really isn’t a good idea.
I’m reminded of a New York Times analysis from last month that marveled at the degree to which the former president’s indictment falls into “the what-goes-around-comes-around department of American politics.” There was a time, not that long ago really, when Donald J. Trump said he cared about the sanctity of classified information. That, of course, was when his opponent was accused of jeopardizing it and it was a useful political weapon for Mr. Trump. … Seven years later, Mr. Trump faces criminal charges for endangering national security by taking classified documents when he left the White House and refusing to return all of them even after being subpoenaed.
That was published a month ago, and the story is even worse now that the superseding indictment has accused Trump of also allegedly conspiring with aides to destroy evidence — something Clinton was never credibly accused of doing. That said, if the former president is determined to keep the focus on his one-time rival, we can certainly take additional steps down this path. In fact, Republicans were so hysterical in 2016 about the Clinton allegations that then-House Speaker Paul Ryan formally requested that Clinton be denied intelligence briefings — insisting that her email practices were proof that she mishandled classified information and therefore couldn’t be trusted. If Trump is the GOP nominee in 2024, should we expect House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to make a similar request?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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