‘It’s the electric chair for me’ if I deleted even one email like Clinton, Trump says

President Donald Trump joked he’d get the “electric chair” if he ever deleted a single email - even a love-note to his wife - as he joked about the ongoing investigation into former rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

“If I got a subpoena for emails, if I deleted even one email, like a love note to Melania, it’s the electric chair for Trump,” the president joked at his reelection campaign launch rally on Tuesday night. He added that Clinton’s missing emails could still be found “somewhere deep in the State Department,” praising Attorney General William Barr: “We now have a great attorney general. Let’s see what happens.”

Meanwhile, House Republicans have called for a hearing on the “multiple security incidents” uncovered by the State Department during their review of Clinton’s private email server so they can question the officials who uncovered at least 30 “widespread security protocol breaches.”

”The unorthodox and unsecure arrangement [Clinton] maintained exposed classified, national security and diplomatic-sensitive information to a myriad of risks and related issues,” Republican Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Mark Meadows (N. Carolina), and Jody Hice (Georgia) wrote in a letter to House Oversight Committee chair Elijah Cummings.

“Some people should be fired, they should lose their security clearances and they should be in jail,” former House Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz said, suggesting that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo should get “personally involved” in the Clinton probe and marveling that no one so far has lost their security clearance over the scandal.

Trump called the revelations “really big” in a tweet on Monday, wondering aloud if Democrats would take time off from their endless probing of the long-discredited “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory to investigate.

The State Department found 23 “violations” and seven “infractions” regarding the private email server Clinton kept at her home while serving as Secretary of State under Barack Obama, and 15 people - “some of whom were culpable in multiple security incidents” - were deemed responsible for the breaches, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said on Monday, citing a report from State Department assistant secretary Mary Elizabeth Taylor. The number of incidents and culprits could increase, given the massive quantity of material involved, Taylor acknowledged in her letter to Grassley, adding that the State Department should be done reviewing the emails by September. 

Clinton’s emails - the ones that exposed her role in rigging the Democratic primary and other misdeeds - are often floated as one of the reasons she lost the 2016 election, but Grassley’s investigation centers on Clinton’s mishandling of classified information using the private email server, which former FBI director James Comey essentially admitted would be a crime if anyone other than Clinton had committed it.

Calling Clinton’s behavior “extremely careless,” Comey acknowledged that 110 emails in 52 email chains found on her private server were classified, while eight chains contained top-secret information and 36 included secret information. Multiple foreign countries reportedly accessed the secret server before Clinton deleted 33,000 emails in violation of federal transparency laws, turning the rest over to the State Department. Clinton claimed a rogue employee acting on their own opted to “wipe” the server with BleachBit in an attempt to purge the files, while Trump and other Republicans point out that the timing - the emails were deleted a week after she received a subpoena to turn over emails relevant to the Benghazi incident - suggests it was a deliberate cover-up.

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