Donald Trump raised a few eyebrows when he said he’d consider pardoning Hunter Biden after the election, but there was another part of the former president’s comments that stood out for me. As part of his latest interview with Hugh Hewitt, the Republican candidate also boasted about his decision not to prosecute former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the wake of their 2016 campaign:
I could have gone after Hillary. I could have gotten Hillary Clinton very easily. And when they say, ‘Lock her up,’ whenever they said, ‘Lock her,’ you know, they’d start, 30,000 people, ‘Lock her up, lock her up.’ What did I do? I always say, ‘Take it easy, just relax. We’re winning. Take it easy. Take it easy.’ I could have had her put in jail. And I decided I didn’t want to do that. I thought it would look terrible. You had the wife of the president of the United States going to jail. I thought it would be very bad if we did that. And I made sure that didn’t happen, okay? I thought it would be bad.
Around the same time, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida told NPR that Trump, while in office, did not tell the Justice Department to “go after” Clinton.
A few days earlier, New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, told ABC News that Americans need not worry about Trump targeting his political opponents in a second term, because he didn’t “go after” Clinton in his first term.
Look, I realize that contemporary GOP politics is defined in large part by its willingness to rewrite recent history. It’s a subject I explored in some detail in my recent book. But the idea that Trump gave Clinton some kind of pass remains one of the more ridiculous myths that too many Republicans insist on peddling.
Indeed, it comes up with surprising regularity. A couple of years ago, Republican Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida argued in apparent seriousness that Trump, after arriving in the White House, made a conscious choice to leave his 2016 opponent alone.
“President Trump took that approach. He said, ’You know what, we’re not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton,’” Waltz said, as if reality had no meaning. The GOP lawmaker added that Trump had said, “‘You know what, let’s move on. Let’s move forward.’”
Nearly a year later, Sen. Ron Johnson also went on Fox News to push the same line. “President Ford decided it was best for America not to pursue prosecution against President Nixon. President Trump pretty much made the same decision and decided not to pursue any kind of prosecution of Hillary Clinton,” the Wisconsin Republican claimed.
To the extent that reality still has any meaning, let’s review the receipts. In Trump’s first year in the White House — after the 2016 election was over and Clinton largely withdrew from public view — the then-president publicly pleaded with the Justice Department to go after Clinton.
A year later, in 2018, Trump told the White House counsel that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton. As former special counsel Robert Mueller documented in his findings, it was around this time that Trump pressured then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to go after Clinton. Ahead of Election Day 2020 — nearly four years after Clinton’s defeat — Trump again publicly called for the Democrat’s incarceration and lobbied then-Attorney General Bill Barr to prosecute Clinton for reasons unknown. None of this was kept secret. It happened out in the open. We all saw it play out in public. As the GOP nominee and his surrogates continue to brag about his magnanimity toward Clinton, they’re asking us to forget what we all saw with our own eyes. As for why this still matters, the problem is not just the fact that Trump, Donalds, Sununu and others are peddling a demonstrably false version of the recent past, the problem is also the significance of their lie as it relates to the near future: If Americans want to know whether the Republican candidate will target his foes and abuse his powers in a second term, it’s highly relevant to know that he targeted his foes and abused his powers in his first term. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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