Trump haunted by 2016 rhetoric about mishandling classified info

It’s one of those pesky details that has slipped down the memory hole, but an odd issue dominated the 2016 presidential campaign. American voters were told, ad nauseam, that Hillary Clinton’s trustworthiness when it came to sensitive materials was one of the single biggest issues of the year.

The media fixated on the Democratic candidate’s email protocols, but the GOP was even more obsessed. As regular readers know, Republicans, with varying degrees of hysterics, made Clinton out to be a literal criminal who put the nation at risk. Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan went so far as to formally request that Clinton be denied intelligence briefings — insisting that her email practices were proof that she mishandled classified information and therefore couldn’t be trusted.

Her election rival, Donald Trump, took an especially keen interest in the issue, telling voters in 2016, “In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

This was not an offhand comment made without forethought. A CNN report noted last summer that Trump “repeatedly called for the lengthy jailing of opponents of his who he claimed mishandled classified materials.”

“One of the first things we must do is to enforce all classification rules and to enforce all laws relating to the handling of classified information,” he said in September 2016. Speaking in July of that year, Trump said Clinton’s mishandling “disqualifies” her from public service.

Indeed, in case this isn’t obvious, the phrase that came to define Republican politics in 2016 — “Lock her up!” — was rooted in the simple idea that Clinton should be literally incarcerated for allegedly mishandling sensitive information.

And it was Trump who reveled in the mantra.

A New York Times analysis marveled at the degree to which the former president’s latest indictment falls into “the what-goes-around-comes-around department of American politics.”

There was a time, not that long ago really, when Donald J. Trump said he cared about the sanctity of classified information. That, of course, was when his opponent was accused of jeopardizing it and it was a useful political weapon for Mr. Trump. … Seven years later, Mr. Trump faces criminal charges for endangering national security by taking classified documents when he left the White House and refusing to return all of them even after being subpoenaed.

The former president, of course, has not tried — and almost certainly will not try — to justify why he pretended to care so deeply about the laws he now stands accused of breaking. For that matter, his Republican allies, who were only too pleased to march in the anti-Clinton parade, are similarly reticent today.

But all of this does not appear to have escaped the attention of the former secretary of state, who published this to Twitter this morning:

It probably won’t be Clinton’s final words on the subject.