Congressman Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who has been one of
the most vocal critics of Donald Trump, called out his party for
criticizing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while
continuing to defend the former president’s decision to take sensitive government information to his home at Mar-a-Lago.
Kinzinger’s comments came days after the FBI released a redacted version
of the affidavit the agency submitted to a federal judge to justify a
search of Trump’s home. The document details how Trump retained
classified material at Mar-a-Lago and that the government had been
working for more than a year to retrieve those materials. A batch of
documents returned earlier this year contained 184 documents marked as classified, including 25 marked as top secret.
“The hypocrisy of folks in my party that spent years chanting, ‘Lock her up,’ about Hillary Clinton because of some deleted emails or – quote/unquote – ‘wiping a server,’ are now out there defending a man who very clearly did not take the national security of the United States to heart,” Kinzinger, who is retiring from Congress after this term, said
on NBC’s Meet The Press. “And it’ll be up to [the US justice department] whether or not that reaches the level of an indictment.
“But this is disgusting in my mind. And, like, no president should act
this way, obviously.”
It’s not yet clear whether Trump will face criminal charges in the
matter. But during the 2016 presidential campaign that propelled him to
the Oval Office, Trump and his Republican allies said his Democratic
rival Clinton should be punished for her use of a private email server
while she was serving as secretary of state.
“Lock her up,” became a rallying cry at Trump rallies on the campaign trail. A US state department investigation ultimately found there was
“no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of
classified information”.
The former justice department official who oversaw the agency’s
investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified material, David
Laufman, told Politico earlier this month that case and Trump’s were different.
“For the department to pursue a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago tells me
that the quantum and quality of the evidence they were reciting – in a
search warrant and affidavit that an FBI agent swore to – was likely so pulverizing in its force as to eviscerate any notion that the search
warrant and this investigation is politically motivated,” Laufman said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/28/kinzinger-republicans-hypocritical-defend-trump-classified-material
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