See below for video of Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA11), speaking last night on “Deadline White House,” and stating:
“…in this case it’s our system of justice…it is Attorneys General, it is District Attorneys, it is the Attorney General of the United States, to hold to account anybody – ANYBODY – who violates the law…So here we are with a president who is either withholding documents required to be given to the archivists by law or destroying them. And that is a criminal act and it ought to be prosecuted as such. Even if it’s Donald Trump.”
Rep. Connolly added:
“There’s a pattern with Donald Trump where people kind of pull their punches. Go back to Robert Mueller…he documented 11 cases of obstruction of justice, but withheld indicting Donald Trump under the thin guidance of an old memo in the Department of Justice [that] said you can’t indict a sitting president even when he commits a crime. And nothing…has happened so far with the Manhattan DA’s investigation of Donald Trump and his business practices. Nothing yet has happened in Georgia in the investigation about whether Trump criminally tried to overturn election results and falsify results in his favor. Nothing has yet happened in the state of New York with respect to Donald Trump’s business practices, even though his own accounting firm has now disavowed 10 years of his financial records as not being reliable.
So here we are with a prima facie set of evidence that Donald Trump basically…showed his thumb and his nose to the Presidential Records Act, which is a matter of law and it is a crime to knowingly violate that law. And it is pretty clear from the evidence we have already that…he violated that law with impunity, he hid records, he withheld records, he destroyed records and he circumvented the phone logs in the White House when he was making phone calls using other cell phones including Secret Service to avoid having a logged in record of a presidential phone call.”
…There’s been a lot of investigations; there’s no action! And I believe the time has come up for…legal action both in the civil realm and in the criminal realm…whether it’s his business practices, whether it’s his assaults on women, whether it’s behavior during the insurrection and during his White House years...He needs to be held accountable. If this is allowed to go unaddressed with impunity, how is one to stop any future president from basically asserting the law is what I say it is and I am not accountable or subject to any penalties pursuant to the law, since I say what the law is?”
“Here we are with a president who is either withholding documents required to be given to the archivists by law or destroying them. And that is a criminal act and it ought to be prosecuted as such. Even if it’s Donald Trump” – @GerryConnolly w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/Pgg0bHll6O
— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) February 16, 2022
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
