Trump is nailed 'dead to rights' and 'it doesn't matter' why he stole nuclear secrets: Morning Joe

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough tried to cut through the chatter around Donald Trump's indictment for stashing classified documents at his home at Mar-a-Lago and refusing to return them to the government.

The former president's defenders have claimed the case is a witch hunt and insisted he had the authority to declassify and keep anything he wants, but the "Morning Joe" host said the evidence laid out in the indictment by special counsel Jack Smith was just too overwhelming.

"It appears by his own words, his own deeds, his own actions, he stole nuclear secrets, right?" Scarborough said. "So let's just break this down. There's people talking -- 'What about Hillary? What about Biden? What about this?' He stole nuclear secrets, allegedly, in his own words, and he knew what he was doing. He's on tape, and they got him dead to rights. He lied to the FBI, and everybody is going, 'Oh my god, the Republicans' -- I'm not looking at the Republicans, I mean, do they really -- if they want to harbor a fugitive politically, who stole nuclear secrets, good luck. You're going to lose even more in 2024, lose even more in 2024, and these people say we are going to commit acts of violence. Guess what -- that's been tried before, they're in jail or going to jail. If you think you're intimidating anybody, like the FBI is just going to say okay, okay, they said that. How many more? Do we have enough jail cells?"

There has been much discussion of Trump's motive for taking the documents and then scheming to hold onto them, but Scarborough said that misses the point.

READ MORE: Here are two paths to booting Judge Aileen Cannon off the Trump Espionage Act case: legal experts

"Why did he do that, do you think?" Scarborough said. "Talking about that like, we don't know why, but it doesn't matter. He stole the worst stuff ... We will see a lot of the noise, but as one admiral said to me, 'You have the ground noise and the signal. Ignore the ground noise, Joe, and focus on the signal.' The signal, a guy as president committing the worst crimes in the White House and outside of the White House of any chief executive in the history of the republic, and my feeling, if the Republicans want to defend him, if they want to completely destroy their party, have at it. We have seen this before as far as what happens when they defend him. This the worst yet, and a lot of them are still too stupid to realize that they are giving up 2024 by doing it."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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