Donald Trump, during his 2015-16 campaign for the U.S. presidency constantly berated former First Lady Hilary Clinton for her having used a private email server for both her government and personal emails while Secretary of State. (She explained that to do otherwise, she would have had to carry two cell/smart phones with her at all times.) It was improper conduct which she later admitted to being a blunder. Yet other people in the U.S. government had done likewise. Trump claimed it was a crime, and he riled up his angry political base by calling for her prosecution and imprisonment. At Trump’s political rallied, he approved of his supporters yelling “LOCK HER UP,” meaning imprison Ms. Clinton. Trump, acting like mobster as he sometimes did, gave her a nickname, constantly identifying her publicly as Crooked Hilary because of it.
Actually, the FBI investigated it and announced only a few weeks before the November, 2016 presidential election that Ms. Clinton committed no crime doing so, and part of the reason for this conclusion regarded her intent, in which she did not intend to in any way harm the federal government and thereby the American people. Thus, it was merely a honest mistake that she later regretted, not knowing that she should not have done it since someone could have hacked into her insecure server and read her emails.
During Trump’s presidency, I often quoted sayings of Jesus and applied to Trump as posts on my Kermit Zarley Blog, showing that he was a hypocrite. Do you remember that Jesus was a carpenter and perhaps a stone mason? One I quoted more than once was Jesus’ well-known statement in his Sermon on the Mount about judging. He said therein, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7.1-5 NRSV).
It has been revealed in the past few days, and it will be elaborated in a book by The New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman says Trump regularly tore up presidential documents, threw them on the floor, and sometimes flushed them down the toilet causing to toilet to be jammed. It appears that President Trump did these things sometimes in order to hide his ill behavior.
All presidential records are supposed to be turned over to the National Archives. The Presidential Records Act requires the White House to preserve all documents relating to the president’s business by doing this. Trump’s aides knew this Act and would retrieve some of the papers and, like a jigsaw puzzle, piece them together and put Scotch tape on them before giving them to the National Archives. It is also being reported that when Trump vacated the White House for Mar-a-Lago in Florida, he took with him 15 boxes of materials, most of which contained classified or top secret materials that belonged in the National Archives.
One funny episode about this is that when Republican President Trump finished delivering a State of the Union message, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat right behind him and slowing tore up all four sheets of the copy of his speech that had been given to her and those present beforehand. Asked later why she did it, she said the speech was full of lies. Trump responded to that by saying that she had committed a crime by destroying government property, which was completely untrue.
Legal experts are now saying that former President Trump may be in some serious legal trouble for mistreating government documents which could result in his imprisonment of up to three years according to the Records Act. It is seems pretty obvious that Trump did this, contrary to Ms. Clinton, with ill intent, and that would be the deciding factor if he is prosecuted. The National Archives has already asked the FBI to investigate this matter. If the FBI finds Trump in violation of the Records Act, the FBI would recommend that the Justice Department prosecute him. This could be some more serious illegal trouble for the ex-president, as if he doesn’t have enough of it already.
So, Trump’s calling out Ms. Clinton for her naive infraction in improperly using her cell phone and calling for her to locked up could make Trump quite the hypocrite again for this intentional misbehavior of his and thereby prove this saying of Jesus.
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