First, a quick history:

Trump got elected in part by attacking Clinton for deleting emails that she deemed personal, then spent four years destroying official documents despite federal law. ⁦@AshleyRParker⁩ ⁦@jdawsey1⁩ ⁦@thamburger⁩ ⁦@JaxAlemany⁩ https://t.co/bbQa9V2geU

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) February 6, 2022

The Wheeling Intelligencer’s 2016 Clinton coverage

In October of 2016, the Wheeling Intelligencer published 16 AP stories, syndicated and local columnists, and editorials that dealt with the issue of Hillary Clinton’s emails. On election day 2016, in case no one had noticed the 16 articles, the paper editorialized:

Clinton broke the law in using private email servers while secretary of state. She knew she was doing so. She understood the law required her to use secure State Department email servers to keep national secrets from falling into the wrong hands.

Once her crime was exposed, Clinton lied about it, repeatedly. She and some of her aides tried to erase some incriminating messages. They withheld others from investigators.

Some Donald Trump history

This month, we’ve learned about some of Trump’s illegal actions while president. The Washington Post described a few of them earlier this week:

President Donald Trump tore up briefings and schedules, articles and letters, memos both sensitive and mundane.

He ripped paper into quarters with two big, clean strokes — or occasionally more vigorously, into smaller scraps.

He left the detritus on his desk in the Oval Office, in the trash can of his private West Wing study and on the floor aboard Air Force One, among many other places.

And he did it all in violation of the Presidential Records Act, despite being urged by at least two chiefs of staff and the White House counsel to follow the law on preserving documents.

“It is absolutely a violation of the act,” said Courtney Chartier, president of the Society of American Archivists. “There is no ignorance of these laws. There are White House manuals about the maintenance of these records.”

And more recently, from the New York Times Maggie Haberman:

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman claims that White House staff would often find Trump’s toilet clogged up with shredded documents—and they reportedly believed the papers were destroyed and flushed by the president himself. https://t.co/AvgtGmT9Ib

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 11, 2022

Here is a look at the Intelligencer’s recent Trump coverage

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An afterthought – what would WV’s Senator Capito say?

Back in the summer of 2016, Clinton’s emails came-up at a Shelley Moore Capito news conference and the West Virginia senator had this to say:

She repeatedly referenced Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying Clinton had “squandered Americans’ trust.”

Here’s a thought: perhaps at Capito’s next news conference, someone could read her Clinton quote back to her and then ask, in light of the revelations about how Trump has mishandled government documents, whether she now believes that Trump has “squandered Americans’ trust.”

What was I thinking? Stenographers don’t do research and they certainly don’t ask Capito any difficult questions.