Not only did Donald Trump bring up Hillary Clinton’s emails again Wednesday night, but the former president—eight years after he made that issue central to the 2016 campaign—still doesn’t seem to have a grasp on the scandal that helped him become president.
On Newsmax, where friendly host Greg Kelly suggested Trump is protected by “the hand of God” and lobbed softball questions like whether he is “lonely,” the former president went into a diatribe about his then-Democratic opponent that sounded quite familiar.
Clinton “used all sorts of acid testing and everything else,” Trump said, in reference to the former secretary of state deleting emails that were stored on her work server, and which her staff had deemed private in nature. “They call it BleachBit, but it’s essentially acid that will destroy everything, you know, within ten miles. I mean, what she did was unbelievable. Nothing happens to her.”
ADVERTISEMENT
BleachBit is a software program, not acid.
Yet Trump, in the second presidential debate in October 2016—and then again in a campaign speech a few months prior—didn’t appear to understand that.
That August, he said: “Thirty three thousand emails that she deleted. They’re gone. And not only deleted folks, she bleached—which somebody said they had never even heard of—in a very expensive fashion, used chemical so nobody will ever be able to see ‘em. Who does this?”
When reached for comment Wednesday night, a spokesperson for the former president did not address Trump’s repeated invocations of “acid” in reference to Clinton’s email scandal, saying simply: “President Trump referenced BleachBit which is the software Hillary used to illegally delete emails from a private server she used while serving as Secretary of State.”
Trump had broached the subject after he was asked about his felony indictments over mishandling classified information—the same thing he accused Clinton of doing.
And once again, Trump insisted he did nothing wrong. “I took them very legally, and I wasn’t hiding them.”
