Tucker Carlson: Democrats arrested Trump because 7 years ago he said Bush lied about Iraq

• On the third installment of "Tucker on Twitter," Carlson said Trump's arrest was for accusing George W. Bush of lying about Iraq in 2016.
• "That was the one thing you're not allowed to say," Carlson said.

Exiled Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson argued today on the latest installment of "Tucker on Twitter" that Donald Trump wasn't arrested this week for failing to hand over classified documents: The real reason was for saying that former President George W. Bush lied about WMD in Iraq seven years ago.

"We can point to the precise moment that permanent Washington decided to send Donald Trump to prison," Tucker said: Feburary 16, 2016. That's the day of a Republican primary debate in Greenville, South Carolina, at which Trump violated Republican orthodoxy by accusing George W. Bush of lying in the run-up to the Iraq War.

"We should never have been in Iraq," Trump said at the debate. "They lied, they said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none, and they knew there were none." The remarks caused quite a stir, and Trump later backed off the statement. He has repeatedly claimed falsely that he opposed the invasion of Iraq (he supported it).

"That was the one thing you're not allowed to say," Carlson said on his show. And because Trump said it, Carlson argued, the clock started on a process that led to his arrest this week.

"What just happened was always going to happen," Carlson said.

That clock apparently ticked through Trump's nomination as the GOP candidate for president, through his electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, through a four-year term in office during which he enjoyed the full support of the Republican Party, through his nomination as GOP candidate in 2020, and through his decision in January 2022 to withhold — as alleged in the indictment against him — at least 140 classified documents from the National Archives and Records Administration.

The Deep State's long-game anger seems to have been exclusively reserved for Trump, however, given that at the moment he made that verboten statement, the sitting president was Barack Obama, whose meteoric rise to office was fueled largely by his opposition to the Iraq War.

It may be that Obama escaped a cell because he never bluntly accused Bush of lying or deliberately misleading — unlike his Democratic allies Rep. John Dingell, former Sen. Al Franken, Rep. Elijah Cummings, Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, and a host of journalists, politicians, activists, filmmakers, and others who have repeatedly, forcefully, and publicly accused the proponents of the Iraq War of lying.

Many of those accusations are based on the Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, which accused the Bush Administration of "exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq's weapons programs."

Such is the power of the permanent government in Washington: If you cross it by repeating the same things that many other politicians have, you risk becoming elected president.