Fierce Hillary Clinton Critic Marco Rubio Dismisses Trump's Mishandling Of Documents

The Florida GOP senator said Trump ripping up presidential documents is "not a crime" — a marked contrast to how he went after Clinton for her email server.
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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was a vocal critic of Hillary Clinton and her mishandling of government information as secretary of state. In 2016, he called it “disgraceful and unbecoming of someone who aspires to the presidency.”

“There is simply no excuse for Hillary Clinton’s decision to set up a home-cooked email system which left sensitive and classified national security information vulnerable to theft and exploitation by America’s enemies,” he added. “Her actions were grossly negligent, damaged national security and put lives at risk.”

But Rubio ― like other Clinton critics ― is far less concerned about transparency and the proper handling of government documents these days.

In a Fox News interview Monday, Rubio dismissed reports of Donald Trump ripping up documents as president and failing to hand over boxes of official government papers to the National Archives and Record Administration, as he is required to do by law.

“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 ― things that I just knew where flat-out not true. Nowadays, in the mainstream media, you just need one source to smear Donald Trump. Maybe you don’t even need that,” Rubio said.

“The documents that were at Mar-a-Lago by all accounts were turned over,” he added. “Look, if the process wasn’t followed there, then 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.”

Rubio does all he can to obfuscate and distract with the answer. The National Archives itself has confirmed that some of the documents it received from the White House “included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump.”

And last month, the agency retrieved 15 boxes of presidential records from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Some of those documents were clearly marked classified and even “top secret.” By law, all records created by the president must be turned over to the National Archives at the end of the administration.

So the documents were not “turned over” properly, as Rubio seemed to imply. The National Archives had to go to Trump’s personal residence and retrieve them a year after he was supposed to hand them over.

And sure, lots of things have been written about Trump. But the same was true of Clinton, who once faced a headline that claimed she adopted an alien baby. But Rubio wasn’t concerned with media sensationalism in 2016.

While serving in President Barack Obama’s administration, Clinton set up a private email server for her government and personal business ― instead of having separate accounts. She said she did so because she didn’t want to have to carry around two mobile devices.

Sen. Marco Rubio is defending former President Donald Trump's handling of government documents, despite his fierce criticism of Hillary Clinton and her email server.
Sen. Marco Rubio is defending former President Donald Trump's handling of government documents, despite his fierce criticism of Hillary Clinton and her email server.
Saul Loeb/Getty Images

Clinton tried to separate, and hand over, the government emails for preservation, and she was hardly the first official to use a non-government account for personal business.

In her forthcoming book, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who extensively covered Trump, reports that White House staffers occasionally found wads of paper clogging toilets, leading staffers to believe the president had tried to flush documents.

But aside from that tidbit, Trump did indeed have a habit of ripping up papers he should have been preserving under law. Top staffers reportedly warned him multiple times that he was not allowed to do that.

And as a presidential candidate running against Clinton in 2016, Trump, too, was very concerned about the proper handling of government documents. He made Clinton’s email server a central focus of his campaign. Chants of “Lock her up!” and signs saying “Hillary for prison” were common at his rallies.

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