Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is claiming the administration he led “was very diligent in making sure we preserved” White House documents, a claim that stretches credulity.
Meadows, who was referred to the Dept. of Justice two months ago for criminal contempt of Congress, made the stunning claim on Newsmax (video below). He did so despite multiple reports of White House documents being flushed down the toilet, a president habitually tearing up documents, “burn bags,” earlier reports of documents hidden on secret servers, and more than 15 cartons of documents – unknown quantities still missing – that belong to the federal government, including top-secret classified documents being removed from the White House and stored at Mar-a-Lago after Donald Trump’s term in office.
On Wednesday the National Archives asked the Dept. of Justice to investigate Trump’s handling of White House materials.
Meadows is a former U.S. Congressman who knows all about the dangers of “mishandling” documents. As The Washington Post reported in 2016, at a rally for then-candidate Donald Trump, “Rep. Mark Meadows prompted the crowd to chant ‘Lock her up,’ the latest anti-Hillary Clinton refrain that caught on at the Republican National Convention last week.”
Those “lock her up” chants referred to Clinton’s supposed mishandling of government documents. But unlike Clinton, the former FBI official who headed the investigation into her emails says proving criminal intent in this case would be a “slam dunk.”
Former White House Press Secretary for President Bill Clinton, Joe Lockhart, says, “Meadows makes the right comparison here. Before Biden Administrations, the Department of Justice actually investigated and prosecuted political criminal behavior. And when it didn’t rise to a crime, they gave public lectures that turned an election. Times have changed.”
Watch:
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license