Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) despite his accomplished legal background, seemed to have a hard time Thursday wrapping his head around the news that a third defendant had been added to a case connected to former President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.
The Justice Department added Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira as yet another defendant in the case—though Hawley falsely characterized the move as Special Counsel Jack Smith “charging random people.”
Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Hawley about a “two-tiered system of justice,” which she claimed was evidenced by a plea deal nearly given to first son Hunter Biden for tax and gun crimes. She then pointed to the fact that “they just keep on piling on Trump from every corner”—an apparent reference to the former president being hit Thursday with an additional charge for willful retention of national defense information and two more obstruction counts.
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“Now, Laura, we’re down to charging like random people. Just throwing those into the indictment,” Hawley said.
De Oliveira is accused in the latest indictment of badgering another Mar-a-Lago employee to delete security footage sought by federal investigators—telling them “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,’” according to the charges.
De Oliveria is also accused of sloppily draining Mar-a-Lago’s pool, thereby flooding a room containing the surveillance video logs.
“Is there any coincidence that the DOJ rushes to add these new indictments today after the Hunter debacle, after their own self-dealing and two-timing is exposed? After they tried to hide from us the true extent of this plea deal? That gets blown up and then it’s like, ‘Oh, we have to go indict Trump on something else,’” Hawley said, offering a similar narrative to one that Alina Habba, one of Trump’s lawyers, pushed earlier this week.
“It’s so brazen right now what they’re doing. It is really a subversion of the rule of law,” continued Hawley, who voted to overturn the 2020 election results after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“I mean, they are taking the rule of law and turning it on its head.”
