Hours after Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned in a Miami courthouse Tuesday on charges relating to his alleged mishandling of classified documents, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson came to his defense in his latest Tucker on Twitter video series.
Despite an escalating dispute with Fox News over the Twitter videos, Carlson returned to the social media platform, expressing support for the former president and criticizing the very concept of classified documents, asserting casually that in Washington, D.C. “everything is classified.”
Trump’s indictment on 37 counts—31 of which relate to his alleged willful and unauthorized retention of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act—is “transparently political,” whined Carlson, who spent one of his final days at Fox sitting dutifully in front of Trump during an interview a week after the former president was arrested and arraigned in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
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“Washington is a city where internal memos about Labor Day are classified because everything is classified,” Carlson said.
“Your government has classified more than a billion federal documents—most of them boring and pointless and a danger to no one—and locked them away in secret where you can’t see them because you may be an American citizen but not really, and therefore you don’t have the necessary clearances to know what’s going on,” he told viewers. “And by the way, none of this is done to make America safer any more than Covid restrictions were designed to make you healthy.”
Trump could face 20 years in prison if convicted. “Most elected Republicans,” Carlson contended, “will not be sad if he dies in jail.”
Carlson closed his third episode of Tucker on Twitter by likening the former president to a martyr, and told viewers that they should be “upset” by the indictment.
“Whatever else you say about him, Trump is the one guy with an actual shot at becoming president who descends from Washington’s long standing pointless war agenda,” he said. “And for that one fact, they are trying to take Trump out before you can vote for him. And that should upset you more than anything that’s happened in American politics in your lifetime.”
