Five takeaways on what Trump said about locking up Hillary in 2016 campaign and thereafter

Donald Trump said in a weekend interview that he didn't agree with rally chants of "Lock her up" — a staple of his successful 2016 presidential campaign.

In fact, Trump said in the interview on Fox News that he “didn’t say, ‘Lock her up,’ " in reference to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, but rather "the people said, ‘Lock her up, lock her up.’ ”

Trump also suggested the iconic chant was just stump talk.

He said: “Then, we won. And I say — and I said pretty openly, I said, all right, come on, just relax, let’s go, we’ve got to make our country great.”

Trump also claimed he was the cooler head that rebuffed demands to investigate and prosecute Clinton after he assumed the presidency.

"And they always said, ‘Lock her up,’ and I felt — and I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing. And then this happened to me,” the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential said.

So what did Trump say? Here are five takeaways.

'Lock her up' wasn't just a chant. It was central to Trump's 2016 campaign.

A principal theme of Trump's initial run for the White House was his castigation of what he said was political corruption by the ruling elite. It was a mainstay of his populist message that working Americans were being sold out, whether in trade treaties or domestic policies, by the governing class.

The "lock her up" chant was often preceded or succeeded at his rallies by another call to "drain the swamp." In his inaugural address, Trump took an even more dystopian level, claiming that the era of "American carnage" was over.

Trump made Clinton the face of the corrupt ruling class.

The TV star-turned-political leader unfailingly referred to his rival as "Crooked Hillary." And from there, the "lock her up" call germinated.

At a speech in Lakeland in 2016, Trump called the Clintons "very dishonest and a very bad period," and referenced President Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment.

He added: "Americans honestly have had it with the years and decades of Clinton corruption. It's corruption."

Trump said Hillary and her lawyers should be 'jailed.'

Trump often prompted the slogan in referring to the email scandal involving Clinton.

"She gets a subpoena, she gets a subpoena and after, not before, that would be bad. But after getting a subpoena to give over your emails and lots of other things, she deleted the emails," he said in that Florida speech eight years ago. "She has to go to jail."

The crowd then chanted "Lock her up" as Trump then also called for imprisoning the lawyers who represented Clinton and that he also claimed covered up the matter.

Poll: Majority agrees with Trump conviction; Biden tops Trump by a percentage point.

"Those representatives within that law firm that did that have to go to jail," Trump said.

Trump also said he believed there had been inappropriate information exchanges between the Department of Justice and Clinton during the FBI investigation of the email storage, and he vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to reopen the probe.

"This corruption is just one more reason why I will ask my attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor," he said. "And furthermore, furthermore, we are going to investigate this phony investigation."

But did Trump really mean it?

The record of Trump's pursuit of Hillary Clinton during his single White House term is unclear.

A special prosecutor was never appointed to investigate the Clinton email saga, despite his campaign pledge.

In his 2022 book, "One Damned Thing After Another," former Attorney General William Barr said then-President Trump told him in a November 2018 meeting not to prosecute Clinton.

"He said that, despite the chants of 'Lock her up!' from some of his supporters, he had felt after the 2016 election that the email matter should be dropped," Barr wrote. "Even if she were guilty, he said, for the election winner to seek prosecution of the loser would make the country look like a 'banana republic.' "

But a year earlier, congressional Republicans in the House oversight and judiciary committee announced they would investigate the FBI's conduct of the probe into then-Secretary of State Clinton's handling of emails.

Despite what Barr said Trump told him, the president's rhetoric and social-media posts continued to call for investigations and arrests of political foes.

In October 2020, Trump railed against electoral and governance actions he said were taken by President Barack Obama and Democratic rival Joe Biden when he was vice president.

"Where are all of the arrests? Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!" Trump wrote in one post.

He alter added in all caps: "Wow!!! NOW DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN — GOT CAUGHT!!!"

Trump's 'perfect' phone call — the pursuit of Joe Biden

In the summer of 2019, Trump also turned his sights on former Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden had just announced his 2020 presidential run, and Trump was seeking political dirt on the man he assumed would be his main challenger.

In a July call to new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump pressed his counterpart to state that his government was probing Biden on allegations of corruption. Zelenskyy did not, and then the delivery of U.S. military aid to Kyiv was delayed.

The call led to Trump's first impeachment by the Democratic majority in the U.S. House. Trump denied wrongdoing and he was acquitted by the GOP-led U.S. Senate in early 2020.

But Trump's attacks on "Crooked Joe" Biden have relentlessly continued and were joined in early 2022 by the GOP-led U.S. House. So far, however, the committees investigating the president have not generated meaningful evidence to support Trump's and Republicans' claims of wrongdoing by the president.

A key figure who sparked the Biden-Ukraine investigation, Boca Raton resident Lev Parnas, now says there was no Biden fraud in Ukraine.

"The whole motive and the whole Biden stuff was never about getting justice, and getting to the bottom of Biden criminality or doing an investigation in Ukraine," Parnas said a December 2023 interview. "It was all about announcing an investigation and using that in the media to be able to destroy the Biden campaign and have Trump win."

U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat whose district covers swaths of Palm Beach County, in March called the GOP House leadership's bluff during a House Oversight Committee hearing.

Moskowitz dared committee chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, to call an impeachment vote on Biden. Moskowitz even made the motion — sardonically saying, "I want to help you out" — to impeach and called out Comer to second it and hold the vote.

Comer demurred, and Moskowitz then tore into the chairman and his GOP colleagues.

"No? Nothing? We got nothing," Moskowitz began. "I want … to show the America people that they're never going to impeach Joe Biden. It's never going to happen, because they don't have the evidence. This is a show. It's all fake."

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at [email protected]. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump says he never said to lock up Hillary. Here is what he said.