‘Unbelievable’ is right when it comes to Trump’s staggering hypocrisy over documents

But her emails, though.

You remember that refrain from the 2016 presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, right?

It was about all anyone could talk about anytime the political press went looking for “balance” in a campaign that featured one fresh outrage after another on the Trump side of the aisle. If Trump generated negative coverage for five days in a row, then you could bet your last dollar that Clinton’s foibles — and she was not without them — would get featured again and again.

The emails and the private email server. Her speeches before Goldman Sachs. Her handling of Benghazi, despite hours of candid testimony. Her role in the Clinton Foundation’s global philanthropy. Her hawkish support of Libyan rebels. Again and again those stories would be featured alongside one scandal after another by Trump.

All in the name of “fairness.”

But it was the chanting — the “lock her up” refrain — that represented the nadir of the whole sorry campaign for me. And all of that came back in a hurry Friday afternoon as the Department of Justice, acting on a judge’s order, released a heavily redacted affidavit laying out its justification for the extraordinary step taken last month when it secured a warrant to raid Trump’s home and private office in Florida.

The document makes clear that among the 15 boxes of materials improperly removed by Trump from the White House, and returned earlier this year after months of negotiations, 14 contained a total of 184 unique classified documents.

Of them, 25 were top secret, defined as information that poses a grave risk to the national security of the United States.

More alarming is that the FBI’s sworn statement to the judge said it had reason to believe other, similarly secret documents were not returned. The sworn statement said agents expected to find evidence of obstruction of justice at the compound.

To read the affidavit was dispiriting in the extreme. That it came to this, to a raid on a former president’s home is, well, unbelievable.

That’s the word retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn used in July, 2016 when he stood at the podium at the GOP convention in Cleveland. He was speaking about Clinton, who would make history the next week when Democrats made her the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party.

“We do not need a reckless president who believes she is above the law,” Flynn said, emphasizing the pronoun and touching off a chant by the crowd that would become a signature phrase of candidate Donald Trump’s campaign that fall: “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

At the podium, Flynn smiled. “Lock her up. Yes, that’s right. Lock her up. I am going to tell you what. It’s unbelievable.”

Indeed. Unbelievable that a retired three-star general would be standing in front of an intensely partisan crowd screaming to have a candidate for president put in prison.

Even more unbelievable then was that Flynn himself would in less than a year be caught lying to investigators — and to Vice President Mike Pence — about a conversation with the Russian ambassador before Trump took office. He’d later plead guilty, then withdraw the plea, and then receive a presidential pardon.

Trump forced him to resign after 22 days.

Called Clinton’s emails disqualifying

Six years after his speech, what’s unbelievable is that same rank hypocrisy that was behind Flynn’s smug chanting in Cleveland is resurfacing with such intensity as Trump’s latter-day defenders respond to Friday’s release of the affidavit.

They loudly accuse the FBI of unfairly, even corruptly, targeting the former president. And Trump himself? He who often called the investigation of Clinton’s sloppy handling of emails disqualifying for the Oval Office? He resorted on Friday to his favorite response to bad news in the courtroom. He attacked the judge.

“Judge Bruce Reinhart should NEVER have allowed the Break-In of my home,” Trump fumed. “He recused himself two months ago from one of my cases based on his animosity and hatred of your favorite President, me. What changed? Why hasn’t he recused himself on this case? Obama must be very proud of him right now!”

I doubt anyone — especially a former president — is proud of any part of this story.

Clinton’s handling of her emails was sloppy, and her decision to install a private server was a grave mistake. But criticism on that front was wildly out of proportion in 2016. And never on her worst day did she remove classified documents and then seek to obstruct the investigation into their mishandling, as the FBI claims happened at Mar-a-Lago.

Nor did she vilify the FBI when it sought those records.

And all these years later, it’s still the hypocrisy that rankles the most.

Michael A. Lindenberger is vice president and editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star, and a member of its editorial board.