Former President Donald Trump told Megyn Kelly, who hosts a podcast on SiriusXM, during an interview that the classified documents case against him showed a clear double standard, and maintained that he did nothing wrong.
She pressed the former president, who is campaigning to run for reelection in 2024, on why he didn’t hand over all the subpoenaed documents before the Mar-a-Lago raid, and pointed to the released audio of a phone call where he mentions a “big pile of papers ... highly confidential, secret.”
“Some argue that, criminal or not, you behaved irresponsibly with our national security documents,” Ms. Kelly said.
CNN had obtained the tape of the 2021 call, which appeared to be part of the evidence in the case against President Trump. In a later interview on Fox News, Mr. Trump said he was bluffing when he said he was looking at several classified documents, which he said in the call referenced an attack on Iran. He said what he actually had on his desk was “nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.”
He refuted Ms. Kelly’s suggestion that he acted irresponsibly and pointed to the fact that he had already defended those actions.
‘Double Standard’
President Trump attacked the Biden administration prosecution for not giving the former vice president the same treatment for retaining documents. Ms. Kelly added that Hilary Clinton had not only retained but destroyed federal documents.
“What’s crazy is you’re really accused of keeping documents and not turning them over when you were allegedly required to. But you weren’t accused of destroying any documents. Hilary Clinton destroyed documents while under subpoena while under subpoena and wasn’t even charged,” Ms. Kelly said, referencing the 33,000 emails Ms. Clinton kept in a private account on private servers that she then disposed of.
“Does it make you angry?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Hilary Clinton got a subpoena from Congress ... that’s the ultimate subpoena.”
“Nothing happened. There’s a double standard in this country, and people aren’t standing for it.”
