As a presidential candidate last year, Donald Trump suggested that innocent people don’t plead the Fifth Amendment.
“The mob takes the Fifth Amendment. If you’re innocent why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa in September, a couple of weeks after IT specialists who worked for Hillary Clinton invoked their Fifth Amendment rights during testimony before Congress.
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On Monday, it was reported that Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, plans to plead the Fifth in response to a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government during the presidential campaign.
The committee subpoenaed records for several Trump aides, including Flynn, who was fired by Trump on Feb. 13.
The retired lieutenant general himself criticized Clinton aides for pleading the Fifth during the course of the email investigation. In June, Flynn tweeted about Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department specialist who set up Clinton’s private email server. Pagliano invoked his Fifth Amendment rights several times, including during a hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi and during a deposition for the watchdog group Judicial Watch.
@HillaryClinton IT specialist takes 5th over 100 times. #Trump2016 #fieldoffight #AmericaFirst https://t.co/5U4R8FQ8JN
— General Flynn (@GenFlynn) June 23, 2016
In September, during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee, two other IT specialists who worked on Clinton’s server invoked their Fifth Amendment rights.
“Now the people who destroyed the emails are all pleading the Fifth Amendment in front of Congress today,” Trump said at a rally just after the hearing.
“Have you seen what’s going on in front of Congress? Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment. Horrible. Horrible, and will anything happen? That’s going to be the question, we’ll find out.”
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