DOJ Official Who Investigated Hillary Clinton Says There is No Comparison Between Her Case and Trump’s
Photo via PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images
A former Justice Department prosecutor who helped oversee investigations of Hillary Clinton’s email usage says there’s no comparing that with the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
David Laufman stepped down from the DOJ in 2018 after leading the department’s counterintelligence division, but his resume includes the Clinton email server investigation and the probe of David Petraeus. Politico spoke to Laufman in order to get his take on the FBI’s raid, which was supposedly carried out to account for the boxes full of classified materials that Trump took with him when he left the White House.
As the public discourse about Trump’s case played out, the involvement of classified materials prompted a renewed conversation about Clinton’s emails since Trump made it the basis of his campaign against her in 2016. As Trump and his allies claim Democrats have weaponized federal law enforcement, Laufman expressed doubt that Trump’s case is comparable to Clinton’s.
“People sling these cases around to suit their political agenda but every case has to stand on its own circumstances,” Laufman said. “For the department to pursue a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago tells me that the quantum and quality of the evidence they were reciting — in a search warrant and affidavit that an FBI agent swore to — was likely so pulverizing in its force as to eviscerate any notion that the search warrant and this investigation is politically motivated.”
As questions persist about what evidence prompted the DOJ to authorize the raid, political observers have wondered whether there existed additional cause for it than simply boxes of classified material. As for the documents themselves, Laufman told Politico that Trump’s potential culpability depends on the volume of material in his possession, their classification level, and whether he and any allies misled or resisted handing them over to the National Archives.
