Former President Donald Trump claimed in a TV interview on Wednesday that Hillary Clinton “hammered her phones” and used “essentially acid that will destroy everything within ten miles” to get rid of email on a personal server she kept as Secretary of State while discussing an investigation into President Joe Biden over alleged improper handling of classified documents.
“What she did was unbelievable, nothing happens to her, nothing happens to Bill Clinton—he took it out in his socks, you know,” Trump said in the interview, which was hosted by Greg Kelly on Newsmax.
The comments came after a report from the Justice Department last month declined to recommend prosecuting Biden despite determining that he had mishandled classified documents. The special counsel behind that report, Robert Hur, who Trump appointed as district attorney for Maryland in 2018, resigned earlier this week ahead of testifying to Congress.
House Democrats criticized the report for judgments in it about Biden’s memory, including claims that the full transcripts of interviews with Biden painted a different picture than the one that made it into Hur’s report. Meanwhile, Republicans and other critics of Biden pointed to it as evidence that Biden’s mind was deteriorating. According to the Hur report, it would be unwise to prosecute Biden for mishandling classified information because a jury might find him to be “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Trump’s remarks came as Republicans try to make a campaign issue over the report and the underlying alleged mishandling of the classified documents by Biden, which contain details about Biden’s role in former President Barack Obama’s 2009 Afghanistan troop surge.
After the report was released, Biden gave a press conference where he defended his memory and pushed back on the idea that he’d forgotten his son Beau’s date of birth, telling reporters “my memory is fine.”
Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, which she was accused of keeping during her time as Secretary of State during the Obama administration so her emails wouldn’t be subject to public records requests, was also a heated campaign issue during her own run against Trump in 2016.
But Trump’s claim that what she used was literally acid raised eyebrows.
“I believe the term ‘acid wash’, in this tech context, meant computer programs that have the ability to complete obliterate all data from a hard drive so it is absolutely unrecoverable. BleachBit might be somewhat of an example,” posted @ThisThatOther2. “Trump thinks ‘acid’ meant Hillary literally poured acid over the hard drive, it would seem. Idiot.”
According to former Rep. Trey Gowdy, Clinton used a piece of software called BleachBit to delete emails on her personal email server.
“She and her lawyers had those emails deleted. And they didn’t just push the delete button; they had them deleted where even God can’t read them,” Gowdy said, reported Politico.
While BleachBit now advertises its software based on Gowdy’s remarks, and the software does comprehensively overwrite, shred, and delete many private files, it isn’t any sort of acid which can harm anybody in a ten mile radius.
“It’s like the worst game of Telephone except it’s the synapses in his brain telling the story down the line,” said @JCStew1313. “He really doesn’t understand bleachbit or the ‘Socks’ case. Doesn’t stop him from bringing them up.”
The “Socks” case is a reference to recordings former President Bill Clinton kept of conversations between himself and historian Taylor Branch during his term in office. Clinton also had a cat called Socks, but the name of that case came from the fact that he stored the tape recordings in his sock drawer. In 2010, the right-wing group Judicial Watch sued the National Archives and Records Administration over the tapes, which they said should be part of the record of the presidency, but a judge dismissed that characterization and threw out the case.
Still, no one could get over the mental image of Hillary Clinton carrying a big jug of acid and pouring it over her home computer.
“Acid that will destroy everything within ten miles? You gonna latch on to this one MAGAs?” asked @McDuB126.
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*First Published: Mar 14, 2024, 2:27 pm CDT
Marlon Ettinger
Marlon Ettinger writes about politics, crime, and culture. Email him with tips and ideas at [email protected].
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