Donald Trump’s ‘Second Amendment people’ comment

Background

On August 9, 2016, at a rally in Wilmington, N.C., Donald Trump said the following while campaigning to become President of the United States:

“So here, I just wrote this down today. Hillary wants to raise taxes — it’s a comparison. I want to lower them. Hillary wants to expand regulations, which she does bigly. Can you believe that? I will reduce them very, very substantially, could be as much as 70 to 75 percent. Hillary wants to shut down energy production. I want to expand it. Lower electric bills, folks! Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick –if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if — if — Hillary gets to put her judges in.”

Immediately, the general public and media were outraged at the possible implication that Trump just threatened or incited violence against Hillary Clinton.

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On September 26, 2016, I filed a FOIA request to the United States Secret Service for all records pertaining to this. I asked for:

“…any investigation, report, letter(s), memo(s), email(s), etc. that may pertain to this comment and possibly perceived threat.

I ask that you also include any correspondence between any member of the Trump presidential campaign, attorneys for Mr. Trump, and any communication to/from Donald Trump himself, that pertain to these comments.”

The following are the records received.

Document Archive

United States Secret Service

Donald Trump’s ‘Second Amendment people’ comment Documents, Released by Secret Service September 20, 2017 [137 Pages, 34.8MB]

After a FOIA Appeal of the above release, I was able to get the Secret Service to release the additional documents:

Donald Trump’s ‘Second Amendment people’ comment Documents, Released by Secret Service November 8, 2017 [103 Pages, 9.3MB]

Letter from the Committee of Homeland Security, Bennie G. Thompson, Reporting Donald Trump to the Secret Service [5 Pages, 1.3MB]

 

 

 

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This post was published on November 2, 2018 5:50 am

John Greenewald

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