Toiletgate proves Trump can’t be trusted

So remember that the main reason, one of the main reasons why Donald Trump and Republicans told us back in 2015 and 2016, you can’t vote for Hillary Clinton, you shouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, was her emails. And it was the claim that she couldn’t be trusted with secret sends or classified information. She was using private email and thus, you should not vote for Hillary Clinton. And over the four years that followed, we have seen every single opportunity at handling or managing information mismanaged either by Donald Trump or people working for him or his family up to this now almost cartoonish crescendo… climax in which he was flushing documents down the White House toilet to the point of it getting clogged and having to call maintenance to unclog it. 

Now, these claims were initially reported by the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman in her forthcoming book. And there is a fair criticism to make of Maggie Haberman, which is if you knew this for a while, why did you wait until you could monetize it in a book to make it public?

That’s not a unique criticism to Maggie Haberman. Many authors do and did exactly this, which is they knew about all sorts of stuff. You know, Stephanie Grisham did it. I’m blanking on other names, but many Trump era journalists, acolytes reporters, et cetera, knew stuff which they held to then make money off of in a book. 

Okay. That would be a criticism of Maggie Haberman. It is not a fair criticism of her that she publishes unsourced stuff. And while Donald Trump has said this is not true, that he was not flushing documents down the toilet. I do not believe for a second that Maggie Haberman would publish this without the sources that she claims to have. And think back now to the sequence and the context is this cloud put over Hilary Clinton’s head that she, her emails and documents and et cetera,  within the first year of Trump’s presidency year and a half year he was in the oval office, revealing secrets that we received from our ally Israel to Russian spy recruiter, Sergey KAK in the oval office for me, other than the fact that Trump was obviously lying.

That incident was the first one where I realized Trump’s terrible with secret classified information disaster. I’m starting to think that it was projection what he was saying about Hillary Clinton. We then found out that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter, were using private email to conduct white house business. Now why they were even conducting white house business is another very fair question. Nepotism seemingly not preventing Donald Trump from having them work for him, but they were using private email and others were using private email as well. Mark Meadows and others that we’ve learned. So check that off the list. We then learned that Donald Trump would regularly rip up documents and throw ’em on the floor in the white house. And staffers would come in, pick up the shreds of paper and tape them back together. We then learned, what is this number four, number five.

We then learned that they would send documents from the white house in burn bags to the Pentagon to be incinerated, even though documents from the white house are supposed to be preserved as part of the presidential records act. And then the kind of cherry on top, that’s just a cartoon is the imagery of Trump flushing documents down the toilet, and then having to call maintenance to unclog the thing I can, I can imagine it now. And unfortunately, it’s not even a surprise. You may recall that during his presidency, Trump, numerous times talked about people having to flush toilets 10 to 15 times. And I wondered and many in my audience wondered what Trump was doing that he thinks people are flushing toilets 10 to 15 times. It doesn’t make any sense. Well, it might have been that he was trying to flush documents, and that’s why he was having to flush the toilet 10 to 15 times.

So as usual, the case he made against Hillary Clinton was pure projection. It was he who could not be trusted. It was he who was irresponsible with these documents. And then of course, there’s the question of consequences. Sandy Berger, who was Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, took four documents with him inappropriately. He was fined $50,000. He was put on multiple years probation. He lost his law license. 

That was four documents. Trump’s burning documents, ripping documents, flushing documents, and taking documents to his house at Mar-a-Lago, which the national archives had to go and then retrieve. So at the end of the day, of course, Trump was lying about Hillary. Of course, Trump is the one we really couldn’t trust with the documents, but will there be any consequences because people have suffered serious consequences for far less? Unfortunately I think the answer is no. There has been no evident willingness from the current Justice Department to really hold this guy accountable. And there are political reasons and legal reasons which can, can be stated as to why. 

But I do not believe Trump will be held accountable for this. Let me know what you think. Is there a path to accountability? And if so, what does it look like?