In the days and weeks since news broke of the FBI search warrant raid at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound, where agents reportedly discovered a multitude of boxes filled with top-secret, confidential materials and documents that Trump had no business having in his possession, the ex-president has been out hot and heavy with just about every conceivable excuse for his actions he could come up with — including his newest claim that he used the top-secret documents as source material for his supposed upcoming memoir.
But one former Republican lawmaker is not only having no part of the scandal-ridden former president’s excuses, he’s finally saying the one thing almost every American has been thinking since the moment this bombshell news broke — if he had taken confidential, top-secret, federally-protected documents to his private residence and stood accused of the things that Donald Trump currently stands accused of, he’d be rotting in a prison cell somewhere by now. And so would just about anyone else on the face of this earth.
Former TX Republican House Rep. Will Hurd, who also previously worked as an undercover CIA agent, spoke with CNN’s New Day host John Berman and explained the true seriousness and significance of the FBI raid against Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that he now calls home in his post-White House life.
“Of course, it doesn’t clear things up and the excuses of why he had this information is changing every single day, which causes some concern,” Hurd responded when asked about Trump’s newest excuses regarding the supposed memoir he’s working on.
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“The reality is we know that President Trump and his lawyers knew they had the information they shouldn’t have had, they had given boxes back, claimed they didn’t have anything more and that was the reason why the FBI conducted the search in Mar-a-Lago,” the former GOP House rep. explained. “Now, I would also say that because of the FBI and DOJ’s past mistakes that when you do something you’ve never done before, you have to have a level of transparency that they’ve never shown before, and so I think DOJ needs to be making sure that everything that they’re doing, that they’re able to provide as much information and details as possible because of the political sensitivity of this search.”
CNN host Beman went on to press, “I think you used the word ‘ridiculous’ for some of the defenses for having the documents. I remember you asking very hard questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails and the classified information that was in that. Why is it important to not just write off having classified or sensitive, compartmented information?”
“Let’s be honest,” Hurd began to answer with a smile. “When I left Congress, if I would have went to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence SCIF, the special compartment information location where you can store classified documents, and took 15 boxes of classified information and brought it to my house in San Antonio, Texas, and had it in my personal office, guess what? I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you because I would be in prison.”
At the end of the day, that’s it, isn’t it? No one can seem to understand why in the world Donald Trump seems to be consistently let off the hook for blatantly breaking the law, when God knows anyone else would’ve been sent to prison 10 times over by now.
Make it make sense.
You can watch the clip right here:
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
