Trump's complaint about Pelosi ripping up his speech could come back to haunt him: WaPo reporter
Appearing on MSNBC on Sunday afternoon, Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany made the case that Donald Trump's rant after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ripped up a copy of one of his speeches could give the Justice Department a leg up with charging the former President.
In February of 2020, the Democratic leader made a show of ripping Trump's speech up on national TV after he delivered the annual State of the Union address.
That, in turn, led Trump to rage at reporters that her actions were "very illegal" before claiming it was "very disrespectful to the chambers and the country."
Trump's "illegal" claim was based on a belief that Pelosi could be prosecuted for shredding an official government document.
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Now that there are reports that Trump not only tore apart official documents but also reportedly tried to flush paperwork down White House toilets in violation of the Presidential Records Act, Alemany claimed the DOJ might use Trump's whining about Pelosi against him.
"I think that is a key question that if the Department of Justice decides to investigate the former president's mishandling of these documents, that's a question they're going to be looking to answer, was this negligence or was this intentional?" Alemany remarked. "Was the former president aware of what he was doing was wrong and systemically wrong and deliberate? Or was this, like a lot of things that were sloppily done throughout the Trump administration, just poorly handled and the process skirted over?"
"Of course, there is a very fine line between those two things," she admitted before continuing, "But there was a lot of legal hand-wringing done this week. There seems to be two separate issues here, one: did the president violate the Presidential Records Act, and if so, how would the archives go about trying to punish the president because of those violations? And then, two: did the president mishandle classified information, which can be an even bigger legal issue that the president is facing."
"There are two important things to point out here," she continued. "One, he is the former president, and, two, all of these documents have not gone through -- or at least some of the documents that we know of have not gone through the declassification process, and were again, still clearly marked as classified."
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