OAN’s Brooke Mallory
3:47 PM – Sunday, July 30, 2023
Former President Donald Trump has adamantly denied any attempts to have surveillance footage at his private residence deleted after special counsel Jack Smith handed down a superseding indictment on Thursday night.
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“Mar-a-Lago security tapes were not deleted,” Trump said on the Truth Social platform. “They were voluntarily handed over to the thugs, headed up by deranged Jack Smith.”
“We did not even go to court to stop them from getting these tapes. I never told anybody to delete them. Prosecutorial fiction & misconduct! Election interference!” He continued.
The 45th president also said that weaponizing justice on a “fake crime” is actually an attempt to catch him on “obstruction.”
“Same as the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX,” Trump added in a separate post. “They knowingly accuse you of a fake crime, a crime that they actually make up, you fight these false charges hard, and they try and get you on ‘obstruction.’”
Just hours later, on Truth Social, Trump stated that Smith’s Justice Department “thugs” are “now admitting” that the Mar-a-Lago surveillance tapes were not even deleted, like what was initially claimed.
“The crooked election interference ‘thugs’ from the DOJ, headed by the worst thug of them all, Deranged Jack Smith, are now admitting that the Mar-a-Lago security tapes were NOT DELETED,” Trump said. “That’s not what they were illegally leaking to the press… These guys should be prosecuted for misconduct. Also, whatever happened to Crooked Joe’s documents? Where are the ones he sent and stored in Chinatown? Is Deranged Jack going to indict him for this and, at the same time, receiving bribes from China?”
Trump made a number of promises in his Make America Great Again rally speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, which aired live on Saturday night. He spoke on the primary challenges for Republicans who refuse to hold Biden operatives, Democrats, and anti-Trump forces accountable.
He also expressed a desire to facilitate an independent special counsel that could investigate all of the allegations of wrongdoing by the “Biden crime family.”
In contrast to the Trump administration, which appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Democrats’ false allegations of Russian election meddling on behalf of the Trump campaign, Biden has refused to appoint a special counsel to investigate Republicans’ allegations of a global Biden bribery and influence peddling scheme.
House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), are now considering wielding the levers of power under an impeachment inquiry against Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Notably, Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice by a Democrat-led House, and both times the allegations were originally based on efforts to investigate alleged Biden and Democrat schemes. Pausing funds to Ukraine in order to investigate bribery through Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and the 2020 presidential election of Biden and House Democrats’ allegation of insurrection incitement at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
Both of the Democrats’ impeachment trials in the Republican-controlled Senate ended in acquittal.
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