Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) defended former President Donald Trump during an interview on Sunday while discussing the federal indictment that was unsealed last week charging the former president with 37 felony counts.
Graham, who endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential race, gave his defense of Trump during an interview on ABC News’ “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos.
“Well, here’s what I believe. We live in an America where, if you’re the Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, you can set up a private server in your basement to conduct government business,” Graham said before being cut off by Stephanopoulos, who served as the press secretary for former President Bill Clinton.
“I’m trying to answer the question from a Republican point of view,” Graham fired back. “That may not be acceptable on this show. Yes, I don’t like what President Trump did in certain aspects. I don’t like that Joe Biden had classified information on the garage. I don’t like that Mike Pence carelessly took classified information. I don’t like any of that.”
“But what I don’t like is a system in America where the secretary of state, who’s a Democratic candidate for president, has people take a hammer to social media devices and break them apart, apply BleachBit to a hard drive to erase e-mails, allow classified information to get on a felon’s computer — Anthony Weiner,” he said. “You haven’t even mentioned that.”
“Most Republicans believe we live in a country where Hillary Clinton did very similar things and nothing happened to her. President Trump will have his day in court,” he continued, later adding: “Did he do things wrong? Yes, he may have. He will be tried about that. But Hillary Clinton wasn’t. Your old boss committed perjury in a civil lawsuit, lost his law license, obstructed justice in a dozen ways, and he didn’t get prosecuted.”
Graham later said that he believes that the Trump case was very similar to the case involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“What he did is very similar, in my view, to what Hillary Clinton did,” he said. “People in the Clinton case took a hammer to a BlackBerry and destroyed it. They wiped clean, with BleachBit, e-mails. They said they were all personal, but some of them actually were classified. And it wound up on Anthony Weiner’s computer, and not a damn thing happen to her.”
Graham also noted that most Republicans “believe that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and people knew it was real but they told the public something else to help Joe Biden.”
“We live in a world where it takes four years to investigate Hunter Biden and you can go after Donald Trump in about 18 months,” he continued, adding: “I’m not justifying his behavior. If it were up to me, nobody would take classified information in their garage or Mar-a-Lago.”
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