Trump Rally Speech Shows He's 'Guilty and Scared': Former Prosecutor

Former President Donald Trump's comments at a Nevada rally on Saturday night indicate that he is "guilty," according to one former federal prosecutor.

Making the rounds ahead of the hotly contested midterm elections, Trump spoke at a rally in Minden, Nevada, to help support GOP Senate candidate, Adam Laxalt, and gubernatorial candidate, Joe Lombardo. He discussed numerous things during his speech, notably insisting that investigations should be launched into numerous other former presidents, and Hillary Clinton, for allegedly mishandling documents themselves.

During his speech, Trump made claims about how the late former President George H.W. Bush handled documents after leaving the White House, which were highlighted in a tweet from Howard Mortman, C-SPAN's communications director.

"George H.W. Bush took millions of documents to a former bowling alley and a former Chinese restaurant where they combined them," Trump said. "So they're in a bowling alley slash Chinese restaurant...By contrast, I had a small number of boxes and storage at Mar-A-Lago—very small, relatively—guarded by the great Secret Service. And yet the FBI, with many people, raided my house. It's in violation, by the way, of the Fourth Amendment, and many other things also."

trump joyce vance scared comments
Above, Donald Trump gives a speech in Nevada in late 2020. Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance said that Trump's recent rally comments indicate that he is "guilty and scared." Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Mortman's tweet was shared by Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and outspoken critic of the former president, who offered her own take on Trump's claims, based on her own legal experience.

"In my experience as a prosecutor, people say stuff like this when they're guilty & scared," she said.

In early August, Trump's Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago was searched by FBI agents as part of an investigation into the former president's alleged hiding of sensitive, top-secret documents taken after he left the White House last year. The search ultimately yielded numerous boxes full of such material, with agents saying that they were not securely stored. Recent reports also indicate that the Department of Justice (DOJ) believes Trump may be hiding yet more documents.

The former president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in regard to the documents, and said that any classified documents that he took from the White House when he left last year had been declassified.

During his speech, Trump alleged that other former presidents did not face any investigations for the documents they took from the White House, citing Barack Obama and George W. Bush as more examples.

"Barack Hussein Obama moved more than 20 truckloads, over 33 million pages of documents, both classified and unclassified, to a poorly built and unsafe former furniture store located in a bad neighborhood in Chicago," Trump said. "With no security, by the way."

Trump's specific claim about Obama's documents has not held up to scrutiny, with fact-checking investigations finding that none of the documents were classified and that they were transferred to the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in 2017. Outgoing presidents also routinely request non-classified documents from their time in office, for inclusion in future presidential libraries.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's office for comment.

Uncommon Knowledge

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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

About the writer


Thomas Kika is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in upstate New York. His focus is reporting on crime and national ... Read more

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