After dismissing the latest conservative talking point that maintains Donald Trump took top secret documents back to Mar-a-Lago to use as source material for his memoirs, a former GOP lawmaker said he'd be in prison already if he tried to pull off what the former president is accused of doing.
Speaking with CNN "New Day" host John Berman, former Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX) spoke from his experience as a former undercover CIA agent to explain the seriousness of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that turned up boxes of sensitive documents.
Asked about the latest defense of Trump holding onto documents, Hurd told the CNN host, "Of course, it doesn't clear things up and the excuses of why he had this information is changing every single day, which causes some concern."
"The reality is we know that President Trump and his lawyers knew they had the information they shouldn't have had, they had given boxes back, claimed they didn't have anything more and that was the reason why the FBI conducted the search in Mar-a-Lago," he explained. "Now, I would also say that because of the FBI and DOJ's past mistakes that when you do something you've never done before, you have to have a level of transparency that they've never shown before, and so I think DOJ needs to be making sure that everything that they're doing, that they're able to provide as much information and details as possible because of the political sensitivity of this search."
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"I think you used the word 'ridiculous' for some of the defenses for having the documents," host Berman pressed. "I remember you asking very hard questions about Hillary Clinton's emails and the classified information that was in that. Why is it important to not just write off having classified or sensitive, compartmented information?"
"Let's be honest," the former GOP lawmaker said with a smile. "When I left Congress, if I would have went to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence SCIF, the special compartment information location where you can store classified documents, and took 15 boxes of classified information and brought it to my house in San Antonio, Texas, and had it in my personal office, guess what? I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you because I would be in prison."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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