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Salon
Lifestyle
Kelly McClure

Hillary talks Trump docs on "The View"

Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton on "The View" (ABC/Lorenzo Bevilaqua)

Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton appeared on "The View" Wednesday to discuss their new Apple TV+ docuseries, "Gutsy," but, expectedly, the hosts were chomping at the bit to turn the topic towards Trump.

After a brief intro and a few moments of niceties, the conversation took a sharp turn towards Mar-a-Lago, causing laughter to erupt amongst the hosts, but Clinton kept a serious tone and reminded them that Trump taking sensitive documents from the White House is nothing to joke about.

"I think this should be taken really seriously," Clinton said. "It's not a joking matter . . . It should concern every American because those documents, and the empty folders, as they were marked, suggest that there was really important secret information that is essential to our country's defense and security. And when the report came out yesterday that the documents also included information about — and we don't know which, an ally or an adversary's — nuclear program, I cannot tell you how terrifying that is."

From here, Clinton shed light on the normal protocol in handling such documents, learned from her time as Secretary of State, saying "literally a military courier would come into my office — it would be an emergency, there wouldn't be time to get to the White House and have a meeting in what's called a SCIF, a secured facility — so usually a man, it was always a man as I remember, walked in [and] he would have like a briefcase locked to his wrist. And he would come into my office and he would say 'You have to look at this immediately, Secretary.' He would unlock the briefcase, he would stand there, he would give me this document that had really delicate, secret information about something of importance. I would read it and then I would sign that I had read it [and] it would go back into the locked box attached to his wrist and off he would go. So I don't understand how these documents ended up where they are. I don't understand how he was permitted to take them, even to the residence, let alone to a country club in Florida."

"Well where was the guy with the lockbox?" Behar asked of Clinton.

"I don't know," Clinton replied. "That's what I'm asking. I don't know . . . And we don't have, yet, an understanding of what was in them. We're getting little drips and drabs like the nuclear posture of an ally or an adversary. But people literally die to get our government information. They go to prison. They get exiled. It's dangerous oftentimes, and the idea that this would have been done I hope everybody takes really seriously."

After hearing everything that Clinton had to say about Trump's handling of the documents, Behar asked the Former First Lady to give her opinion on whether Trump should be indicted for his actions.

"I don't wanna pre-judge. I've been pre-judged, wrongly, enough," Clinton said. "I'm not gonna pre-judge someone else. I think the key is what the facts and the evidence are. What the FBI and the intelligence community learn about these documents; how they ended up there, who else saw them. Because apparently they've been moved around. It's not like they were in a vault. They were in a storage room where people go in and out getting umbrellas for the pool . . . So I think that we have to wait and we have to have two minds about this. No one is above the law. And the rule of law in a Democracy has to be our standard. But, we should not rush to judgement."

Watch the full segment here:

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