MSNBCMorning Joe contributors blasted Republicans who went after Hillary Clinton for her emails who are now eerily silent following revelations that former President Donald Trump took classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago and destroyed papers while he was in the White House.
The National Archives and Records Administration has requested that the Department of Justice investigate if Mr Trump wrongly brought classified documents from the White House to his Florida residence in Palm Beach at the end of his presidency.
Reports have indicated that Mr Trump may have violated the Presidential Records Act when he had the documents moved from the White House.
Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reports in her new book about Mr Trump, Confidence Man, that the then-president made it a habit to tear up documents but that he hay have also tried to flush them down the toilet, leading to White House staffers at times finding documents clogging up the lavatory. A preview of the book was published by Axios.
Democratic adviser Kurt Bardella blasted the Republicans who were focused on the emails of former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign but who now are keeping mum about Mr Trump’s more severe document management violations.
He noted that Republicans investigated Ms Clinton for years for various issues, but “now they have nothing to say about this very flagrant and blatant and warped” behaviour by Mr Trump.
“What happened to the ‘but @HillaryClinton‘s emails’ crowd? Now they have nothing to say about [Mr Trump] flushing documents down the toilet, aides piecing torn documents back together, classified docs hidden in boxes at Mar-A-Lago,” he tweeted on Thursday.
“Where is the Republicans’ yell for security? For preservation? For accountability?” Mr Bardella asked on Morning Joe. “They have nothing to say.”
Host Joe Scarborough said that Republicans were being “hypocrites”, noting that six committees were investigating Ms Clinton, with members of the GOP now complaining about one committee investigation the 6 January insurrection.
“Did some poor White House aide have to go and retrieve it somehow?” Mr Bardella asked, referring to Mr Trump’s reported practice of flushing documents.
Jonathan Lemire, the host of MSNBC’s Way Too Early, added that “it’s obviously an extraordinary double standard”.
“We heard every night in 2016 on this rally stage saying Hillary Clinton abused her e-mails and it was a question of judgment,” he said. “That was the argument Donald Trump made – Hillary Clinton didn’t have the judgment to be president because she would use her private e-mail account for classified information.”
Earlier this week, ex-Trump White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed that the former President would sometimes even chew on torn-up documents.
Mr Trump “loved to tear up those documents,” Ms Manigault Newman told MSNBC after The Washington Post reported that the National Archives recovered 15 boxes of documents that Mr Trump had wrongly had shipped to his Florida residence.
The former adviser said that there are “certainly things that I’m sure cannot be accounted for because Donald Trump became very, very aware that a lot of these sensitive documents would at some point be made public”.
“After [Trump fixer] Michael Cohen left the office and I walked into the Oval, Donald, in my view, was chewing what he had just torn up,” she told MSNBC. “It was very bizarre because he is a germophobe he never puts paper in his mouth.”
After being fired in 2017 – the first year of Mr Trump’s presidency – Ms Manigault Newman has become an outspoken Trump critic.
“His habit of tearing these things up ... my heart truly goes out to the people responsible for going in the trash bins [and] recovering these things,” she told the cable news network.
Ms Manigault added that staff in the Trump White House were briefed on the Presidential Records Act and that “we had been told that if you’re with the president and he hands you something ... you have to account for that”.
She said among the lost records, “there may be documents that can tell the full story about what happened on the days leading up to January 6th, for instance, that we may never see or may never come to light”.
