It would be fitting if former president Donald Trump, who made Hillary Clinton's emails a central focus of his 2016 campaign, is ultimately brought down by classified material, according to Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.)
Appearing on MSNBC on Wednesday night, Swalwell reacted to a report from the New York Times that the National Archives discovered potentially classified information in the boxes of documents Trump took with him when he left the White House.
"I guess you would probably be more surprised if you learned at the end of this that Donald Trump had not taken classified information from the White House down to Mar-a-Lago," Swalwell said. "And when you look at some of the other materials, unclassified, like the embarrassing Sharpie poster board, of course he was doing it to protect his own self-interest, to protect history from judging him for the clownish leader that he was."
Swalwell added that Clinton's case provides a "comparison" for how the Department of Justice should treat Trump.
"Donald Trump has allegedly done, and likely has done, what he accused Hillary of accidentally doing, so he maliciously, it looks like, did what he projected onto Hillary Clinton as accidentally and unintentionally doing," Swalwell said. "So is the Department of Justice up for investigating this and holding Donald Trump accountable, and making sure no future president treats official documents, classified information as it relates to sources and methods and how we protect our troops, as their own personal property, to protect themselves, will they hold him to account? That's really going to be the question going forward."
Swalwell went on to say that Trump has demonstrated a "pattern of mishandling classified information" — from his Oval Office meeting with the Russian foreign minister in 2017, to his efforts to hide details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to "destroying evidence" related to the Jan. 6 investigation.
"In the criminal sense, destruction of evidence is done only for one reason," Swalwell said. "It's because you have a consciousness of guilt, and again it can't just be on the Jan. 6 committee to eliminate this for the American people. The Department of Justice has to make sure there's accountability for this going forward."
After host Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out that both the NYT and the Washington Post published stories about the scandal on Wednesday, Swalwell said the DOJ receives copies of both publications every morning.
"They have a duty to investigate this as as potential criminal matter," he said. "And wouldn't this just be so fitting if the 'but her emails' guy who really ran on that in 2016 was someone who took home classified information that perhaps would have been embarrassing or incriminating against him, and that was ultimately the way he was held criminally liable. That seems like a fitting ending to this five-year saga we've all been mired in."
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