A Republican group opposed to Donald Trump is set to run a new ad on Fox News and CNN this week, featuring an unexpected figure bringing up the case against the former president: Trump himself.
“I will enforce all laws protecting confidential information” he said in a clip from a 2016 rally. In a 2020 clip, he said people “go to jail for it.”
Now Trump is being accused of doing exactly what he opposed: not only keeping supposedly secret documents, but doing so in shoddy conditions. One photo shows boxes of documents stacked near a toilet at his home in Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s time for Trump to stick to Trump’s own standards,” reads the ad’s voiceover:
“Donald Trump likes to talk about jailing his political opponents for improper handling of confidential documents, but he’s the one who stole government secrets from the White House and refused to return them,” said Sarah Longwell, executive director of the organization, in one release message. “We remind Republican viewers that he should be judged by his own standards.”
The Republican Accountability Project, which has launched video and billboard ad campaigns targeting the former president and his congressional supporters, said it was spending $1 million to get the spots nationally as well as in key swing states Arizona, Georgia, Iowa and Wisconsin to operate.