The most shocking part about this story isn’t Marco Rubio’s hypocrisy. That’s a given, like Donald Trump’s slovenly ineptitude or early summer squalls that drop hailstones the size of Louie Gohmert’s head. No, the truly surprising part is that his hypocrisy was so incandescent it actually drew flak from Fox News.
Donald Trump has apparently run afoul of the law—again. This time he’s been accused of physically removing top secret materials from the White House and shoving then in some random Mar-a-Lago linen hamper that’s likely the closest we’ll ever get to a Donald Trump Presidential Library.
Unless you were in a coma during the 2016 election cycle, as many of us no doubt wish we had been, you’ll recall something about Hillary Clinton’s emails and a private server. The world-ending scandal that supposedly proved then-Secretary Clinton was unfit for office involved her sending and forwarding emails from an unsecured account. Oh, and a vanishingly small percentage of these emails may have been classified—in most cases retroactively. Doesn’t sound like much, but the media, led by the venerable New York Times, acted like they’d found a neck-tatted JonBenét Ramsey playing Russian roulette with the Lindbergh baby in a crawlspace under Hillary’s guesthouse.
Importantly, however, investigators concluded that Clinton’s handling of her emails was in no way criminal. As noted by Vox, even Jack Goldsmith, an attorney in the George W. Bush administration, noted that prosecuting Clinton “would be entirely novel, and would turn in part on very tricky questions about how email exchanges fit into language written with physical removal of classified information in mind.”
Physical removal of classified information? Intentionally mishandling classified material? You mean, what Donald Trump just did?
This, of course brings us to the senior Sunshine State senator.
What say you, Marco Rubio?
While speaking with host Bret Baier on Fox News's "Special Report" on Monday, Rubio was asked why Republicans were not expressing the same degree of outrage they displayed when it was disclosed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had used a private email server while working for the White House.
"Well, first of all, I don't know what's true and what's not because they've made up so many stories about Donald Trump over the years that, I mean, things that I just knew were flat out untrue," Rubio said.
Did they, Marco? You mean, like all those hinky Russian connections? Because those were extensively documented. And right-wing media never made stuff up about Hillary Clinton? Seth Rich’s family would beg to differ.
Of course, Rubio is still appalled over the media’s shabby treatment of the “embarrassing” man whom the Florida senator once claimed was “trying to prey upon people’s fears.”
“Nowadays, in the mainstream media, you just need one source to smear Donald Trump, and maybe you don't even need that. So it's hard to tell anymore what really happened and what didn't. The documents that were in Mar-a-Lago by all accounts were turned over,” Rubio said. “Look, if the process wasn't followed there, then that there needs to be something that happens about that. It's not a crime, I don't believe, but the stuff about flushing paper down the toilet—who knows if that's even true?”
Breaking news! Marco Rubio doesn’t think Trump committed a crime by intentionally removing top secret materials from the White House in clear violation of federal law. And yet he thought Clinton’s supposed carelessness was “disgraceful.”
And we already know Trump ripped documents to shreds after “reading” them. Why is it such a stretch to think he’d try to flush them down the toilet? If you try to tell me Trump does anything like a normal human, that’s when I get suspicious.
Of course, while being outraged at every instance of Republican hypocrisy is essentially impossible without the help of a Red Bull IV drip and a thrice-fortnightly sriracha enema, this one is particularly egregious.
It’s not a crime, huh? We’ll see, Marco. We’ll see.
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