Ron DeSantis isn’t letting the little matter of 37 federal counts against Donald Trump keep him from offering a backhanded defense of the former President and current 2024 opponent.
On Friday night, the Governor alluded to Trump’s legal issues regarding retaining classified documents, invoking principles of whataboutism to attack former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a political speech in North Carolina.
“When I was in Congress, I remember … Hillary had the e-mails with the classified and my view was, ‘Well, gee, you know, as a naval officer, if I would have taken classified to my apartment, I would have been court-martialed in a New York minute.’ And yet they seem to not care about that,” lamented DeSantis.
The Governor then asked rhetorically, if there was a “different standard for a Democrat Secretary of State versus a former Republican President.”
“I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let’s enforce it on everybody and make sure we all know the rules. You can’t have one faction of society, weaponizing the power of the state against factions that it doesn’t like,” DeSantis said. “And that’s what we’ve seen.”
DeSantis made the comments Friday night at the North Carolina Republican Party State Convention. While he didn’t mention Trump by name, the remarks were essentially an extended version of a tweet so valued by the former President’s political operation that it was spotlighted in an email showing intraparty support.
“The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” DeSantis tweeted. “We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden?”
The Trump release didn’t include DeSantis’ last sentence: “The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.”
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