Lying remains a hallmark of President Donald Trump’s time in office. This week, he took to Twitter to respond to ongoing Congressional scrutiny of his team by lobbing lies about Hillary Clinton, who he’s still going after despite the election in which he faced her concluding well over two years ago at this point. He asserted this Friday that Clinton “acid-washed” her private email server in an effort to escape scrutiny — but that’s false.
He railed:
‘Will Jerry Nadler ever look into the fact that Crooked Hillary deleted and acid washed 33,000 emails AFTER getting a most powerful demand notice for them from Congress?’
For one, Hillary herself didn’t do anything remotely of the sort, despite Trump’s attempt to convince his followers that like some kind of maniac, “Crooked Hillary” herself took some kind of acid to the computer hardware she used because… presumably… the contents would have opened up some kind of legal vulnerability for her. Even while in office, Trump has been reported to have sought to have criminal probes opened into political opponents including Clinton, despite the already lengthy background of investigations into the Secretary of State turned presidential candidate that turned up not a single criminal charge against her.
Additionally, there was no physical substance used against Clinton’s email server in this case at all, despite Trump’s repeated claims to the contrary, which he’s used to up the stakes of the whole situation and further vilify Clinton. In reality, after an employee of the company responsible for Clinton’s private server — who remains unnamed in the FBI’s report — realized that they “forgot to comply with a December 2014 request from a Clinton aide to delete emails older than 60 days,” in March 2015, they “deleted the Clinton archive mailbox… and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server system containing Clinton’s e-mails.” In other words — there were no chemicals, no secret meetings to destroy evidence, and not even any direct relationship to any kind of Congressional or otherwise investigative scrutiny Clinton has been put under.
Trump and some of his closest allies like Fox host Sean Hannity have repeated their false characterization of the scenario over and over and over again. On about 40 percent of his primetime television shows during the first half of 2018, Hannity trotted out the claim that Clinton “acid-washed” her emails, which translates to him repeating it a full 74 times. Trump, meanwhile, first unveiled the allegation in September 2016, and eventually even confronted Clinton with it during a presidential debate, at which time she denounced the idea as an outright lie.
Trump has a good reason for resorting to his latest round of hyperbolic lies. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) has intensified his own scrutiny of the Trump team, demanding — among other things — the full, unredacted copy of the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which he’s indicated he’s prepared to go to court for.
If the investigation really provided complete and total exoneration for the president, why is he so worried?
Check out Twitter’s response…
Featured Image via screenshot
