State of the Union: Interview With Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)

Interview

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Good to be with you, Dana.

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Dana, the standard is clear. The standard is Navy v. Egan, a 1988 case, unanimous decision from the courts, from the court, that -- Justice Blackmun wrote the opinion. And it said the president's ability to classify and control access to national security information flows from the Constitution. He decides. He alone decides. He said he declassified this material. He can put it wherever he wants. He can handle it however he wants. That's the law.

That's the standard. And Jack Smith can do all this 37 different counts and whatever he wants to do, but that doesn't change the standard. The standard that the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, said was that he can classify and he can control access. He has the sole authority.

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Dana, he has said time and time again he's declassified all this material.

This is -- this is the most political thing I have ever seen. They have been out to get President -- they're going to -- they're indicting President Trump on Tuesday for having material that he declassified that was protected by the Secret Service.

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And the people who are doing it is the administration, the Justice Department from his opponent in the upcoming presidential election.

This is as political as it gets. And, frankly, Dana, it's part of a pattern. We have seen it time and time again with the president over the last seven years. They try one thing. Then they try another. They have continued to go after him. And I think anyone with common sense can see that.

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I go on the president's word, and he said he did. And the Supreme Court said that's what counts.

So, we can have all the -- all the things Jack Smith wants to say, but everyone sees this for the political operation it is. The standard is the standard. I didn't set the standard. The Constitution and Supreme Court did. And they did it in a unanimous fashion, and it was an opinion written by Justice Blackmun.

So that's the standard. That's the fact. Jack Smith can write whatever he wants. But this is a -- this is so political. In 2016 -- I mean, every election, we have now seen this, Dana. 2016, it was a dossier that they used. They knew it was false. They used it to go get a warrant to spy on his campaign. 2018, it was the Mueller investigation.

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2020, they suppressed the Biden laptop story with the 51 former intel officials.

2022, they raided his home 91 days before an election.

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And now they're indicting him before the 2024 presidential race.

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Every single election, they have done something.

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Saying he could is not the same -- saying he could is not the same as saying he didn't.

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Again, Dana, the standard is the standard.

The president of the United States, he can classify and he can control access to national security information however he wants. That's the standard. That's the Constitution. That's what the court said in Navy v. Egan in a 1988 case. I don't know how many more times I can say it.

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So, if he wants to store -- if he wants to store material in a box in a bathroom, if he wants to store it in a box on a stage, he can do that.

That is the -- that is just what the law and the standard is.

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So, again, I think this just underscores how political this whole thing is.

Jack Smith -- do you know how political is when they selected Jack Smith as a special counsel? I actually said in a deposition with Jack Smith -- we deposed him on May 29, 2014, because he was looking to prosecute people who were targeted by Obama's IRS, people Lois Lerner was going after.

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We actually had to depose Jack Smith. And that's the guy Garland picks.

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And I have told you time and time again what the standard is.

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You can't obstruct when there was not an underlying crime.

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No, it doesn't bother me, because, again, you can't have obstruction of something when there was no underlying crime.

The standard is set. The standard is -- the standard is what the Constitution says. And the commander in chief, the president of the United States, has the ability to classify and control access to information. That's what the Constitution...

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... and the court have said.

So you can't obstruct when there's -- there's -- well, you can't obstruct when there's no underlying crime.

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That is the fundamental flaw.

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And when he was president, he declassified the material. He's been very clear about that.

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Dana, saying he -- he could have, saying he could have is not the same as saying he didn't.

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He said that he has declassified this material. He said that.

I mean, now he can't, right, because he's not president now. But when he was president, he did declassify.

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No, not when -- not when he -- not if he -- not if he declassified it when he was president of the United States, for goodness' sakes.

Again, this is -- this is...

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Dana, this is -- what this -- what this truly is, Dana, is an affront to the rule of law. It's an affront to consistent application of the law.

You had Secretary Clinton, who had classified material on a server. She was not president of the United States. She was Secretary Clinton. You have that happen. Nothing happens to her. When you have two people who do the same thing, and one has the standard that I have talked about, but the only one who gets indicted is the Republican, the only one who gets indicted...

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... is the one who was actually president, who did it the right way, oh, my goodness. That is what the American people see.

And the other thing that troubles me about this -- and this is total affront to the rule of law is that they -- that they -- Jack Smith went and got the president lawyer's notes.

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You talk about a violation of fundamental liberty, when they can get access to attorney-client privilege.

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Attorney-client privilege is important. And they violated that.

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I don't think the Presidential Records Act was mentioned anywhere in the indictment, 44 pages, 45 pages. I don't think it was mentioned.

There's always a back-and-forth between administrations when they leave, the president and the National Archives. That's just normal -- normal course of business, but not this time. They decided once again they were going to go after President Trump, something the country has seen the left do, seen the Democrats do for the past seven years.

And they continued all the way up to an indictment that's going to happen on Tuesday.

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We haven't heard a thing. You are right. We are waiting. And I think the whole country is waiting.

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No, you're missing -- you're missing the key -- you're missing the fundamental distinction.

She was secretary of state. President Trump was president of the United States. The Supreme Court decision in Navy v. Egan wasn't about the secretary of state. The Constitution doesn't say, oh, the secretary of state can classify and can control access to national security information. It says the president.

That is the key distinction. But the left doesn't care. They are so determined to get President Trump, they have been going after him since before he ran, when they took a dossier they knew was false, took it to a secret court, got a warrant that was filed on four American citizens associated with his campaign.

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And it's continued to this day.

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And anyone with common sense can see that.

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Because President Trump is not like President Biden.

President Trump doesn't go after his political enemies. He knew what it would do to the country.

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Because President Biden and the left and the Democrats do not care.

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We've already asked for it. We have asked for -- typically, there's a scope memo that goes along with the scope order for a special counsel. We have asked Merrick Garland to give us the scope memo, much like the one Rod Rosenstein wrote to Bob Mueller that outlined a bigger, broader picture of what this investigation was about.

I will tell you this. Last Wednesday, we actually deposed Steve D'Antuono, the head of the Washington field office, who was running that Washington field office when they raided President Trump's home.

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The things he told us, he -- he actually told the Justice Department, where's the U.S. attorney assigned to this case? We shouldn't do the same thing we did with Crossfire Hurricane.

They said, no, we're going to run it out of headquarters.

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We depose people every single -- we depose people every single week to try to get to the bottom of how these federal agencies have been turned on the American people. And we're going to continue to do that important work.

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Well, I mean, look, I disagree, and I think the American people disagree.

And the real jury is the jury that will be there on no November 5, 2024, when President Trump runs against President Biden. And I think the American people are going to put President Trump back in the White House because they know, when he was there, we had a guy who did more what he said he would do than any president certainly in my lifetime.

He knows that there was a big difference between his presidency and what we have now. Under President Trump, we had a secure border. Now we have chaos. Under President Trump, we had $2 dollar gas. Now we got $4 gas. Under President Trump, we had safe streets. Now we have record crime.

Under President Trump, we had stable prices. Now we have record inflation. And, oh, by the way, under President Trump, Russia didn't invade Ukraine. I will take that -- I will take his record over what we have right now any day.

And I think the real jury, the American people, will make that same choice and same decision November 5, 2024.

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Of course we don't want violence. We have condemned violence every time it happened.

I have condemned it when it happened on January 6. I condemned it when it happened in the summer of 2020. It would have been nice if the left would have done the same, because what I saw -- actually, frankly, I saw it on your network. I saw a reporter standing in front of a burning building saying, oh, it's mostly peaceful protests, in 2020.

Let's condemn the violence every time it happens. Let's don't have violence, but let's have the rule of law. Let's have equal application of the law. Let's have that in America. That's what our great country is supposed to be about. Unfortunately, in this administration, they're trampling, I think, the fundamental liberties that we enjoy as citizens.

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Only one of them was president.

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Only President Trump. Let's see what happens with -- let's see what...

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We will see what happens with Mr. Hur's special counsel.

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OK. Dana, thank you.

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