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Former President Donald Trump was deeply critical of the notion of a candidate running for president under indictment in 2016, seven years before he was arrested twice on felony charges during his 2024 presidential campaign.
In 2016 comments unearthed by CNN’s KFile on Monday, Trump slammed his then-opponent, Hillary Clinton, saying she had “no right” to run for president because she was under federal investigation over her handling of classified information on a private email server during her time as secretary of state.
“We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial,” Trump said at a November 5, 2016, campaign rally in Reno, Nevada. “It would grind government to a halt.”
At another rally on November 3, 2016, in Concord, North Carolina, Trump said it would “create an unprecedented constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government” if Clinton won the election while under investigation.
“She has no right to be running,” he said.
Trump, the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, was indicted last month on 37 felony counts in connection to his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. Federal prosecutors presented evidence that he knowingly broke the law, obstructed their investigation and refused to return sensitive documents despite repeated government efforts to retrieve them.
In April, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office charged him with 34 felony counts in a separate case involving an alleged scheme to cover up an affair via hush money payments in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.
No charges were brought against Clinton. Though the Justice Department probe determined that her office had been “extremely careless” in its handling of classified information, investigators concluded she had not acted with criminal intent.
Trump has repeatedly called for the prosecution and jailing of rivals and adversaries accused of mishandling classified information.
Some of his public comments on the subject were cited by prosecutors in his indictment last month. The document listed Trump’s remarks from campaign speeches in 2016 about the importance of protecting classified information ― suggesting he was aware of how serious it was to fail to do so.
“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified,” Trump said on September 6, 2016.
