Trump ‘Probably Thought He Could Outsmart the FBI’
Senior lawmaker takes Republicans to task for hypocrisy
Donald Trump's been caught up in this apparent criminal conspiracy over hoarding the most sensitive and top-secret national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago Florida estate because he thought that — once again — he could outsmart law enforcement and that consequences just don't apply to him.
That's according to various sources, including a celebrity reality TV star who briefly worked with the former president at the White House.
The nation was stunned — and the political right predictably outraged — when FBI agents executed a fully lawful search warrant at Trump's Palm Beach, Fla, home last week.
Subsequently, we learned that boxes of the most classified materials were being withheld and kept illegally in a room at Mar-a-Lago, despite a subpoena for Trump to turn over all of the classified documents.
“Rev, you’ve known Donald Trump longer than I and you know that he thinks that he’s strong smarter than everyone in the room. He probably thought he could outsmart the FBI. He probably lied to his attorneys. It would not surprise me,” Omarosa Manigault Newman, who rose to fame on Trump's reality TV series, The Apprentice and later worked for him at the White House as a political advisor, said in an on-camera appearance on the Rev Al Sharpton's MSNBC program. “What’s abundantly clear is that Donald Trump had an opportunity in earlier parts of this year to hand over everything from Mar-a-Lago to authorities. Donald Trump and his team made the this decision to not hand over those documents.
“The reason this is so significant is that you know this Justice Department has been so careful. They would never, ever go after Trump this way, unless they already knew what documents they were looking for,” she added.
This appears to be a case of Trump flaunting rules, because classified materials are so classified for important reasons, according to Ben Rhodes, who worked in President Barack Obama's White House.
“In the case of a secure compartmented piece of information, even if you have a top security clearance you have to be read into this program of U.S. intelligence. They make levels for a reason and the whole system depends upon people abiding by the rules and Donald Trump clearly acted as if the rules did not apply to him when he took this information with him out of the government facility,” Rhodes said in a separate MSNBC interview.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md) told Sharpton that he's stunned by the hypocrisy of Trump's supporters who once regularly chanted, “Lock her up!” over Democrat Hillary Clinton's use of an email server, but today wants Trump to somehow get a pass on this egregious wrongdoing involving classified materials.
“Donald Trump treads very closely to not following the law in so many different respects. And not honoring what is the law, what is tradition, and what ought to be done. So, I am not so sure that it is out of character for Donald Trump,” the longtime congressman said. “But having said that, I really don’t know a lot more than you know, and the public knows from reading the papers.
“But I will say this: You talk about the discussions, this is happening, it is very important. Nobody is above the law. And I am astounded by the hypocrisy of Republican supporters of Trump who were hell-bent to put Hillary Clinton in jail, hell-bent to have her investigated, and applauded all of the work that [then-FBI Director James] Comey did, which I think may have cost [Clinton] the presidency, and then we say this is unprecedented,” he added.
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