Digital Masta wrote: ↑Tue Jun 13, 2023 5:55 am
I await XX to tell me how Hillary is different and how Trump is uniquely evil and wrong in this sense.
Going to be a little long to cover the variety of scenarios that happened. If you just want the meaty shorter answer without the context, it's in the last two paragraphs. It's a bad comparison to begin with, but Superbob hit an important bit.
"Hillary" in this context means her and/or her aides. Hillary maintained a separate email server that she conducted some business on. She turned over the docs she thought she was required to, then someone in a fit of madness decided the server could be purged. Proper infosec procedure, but not when you're dealing with potentially classified info. That's a big deal. So, documents are gone and we're not entirely sure what was in them to begin with. Based on the evidence available and what was recoverable, it doesn't look to be anything too significant but if it's a normal joe schmoe who did that you're fired and your clearance is yanked. Prison? Who knows. She got 0 penalty though, so it's why I refused to vote for her. The argument "she had the power to declassify" doesn't hold water because of what SB said - there's a process you have to use and you can't just declassify everything you want to say is declassified. The argument "but Trump/whoever used gmail instead of sanctioned email services" also doesn't compare, because we can still get those records from Google (who also has better security and logging). No one has insight into what her team purged, so we can't know if it was a simple blunder or she's burying some super conspiracy. It probably doesn't involve pedophiles in basements under pizza parlors though.
Sidenote: The "Hillary was never president" angle doesn't work as a comparison either. Secretary of State has massive declassification rights as well. Neither can declassify with their mind though...
A step closer to what Trump did is what agents investigated Biden/Pence/et al for - there are bunch of documents labeled 'classified' that ended up going where they shouldn't go. Biden's understanding of handling classified materials may be a few decades stale, but the gist of it is that there have to be certain protections on the documents based on their classification level. If the documents aren't appropriately protected or you otherwise find documents that should be protected but aren't, you turn them in. That's what happened to all of the politicians recently, and this includes Trump. For people at the politician level this ends up being a 'no harm no foul' case. Politician took a secret doc back to his study in his old box of documents? Silly politician! At least (s)he turned them back in when they turned up. Case closed!
"Trump" here being him/his team like Hillary above. Trump, for whatever reason, decided he
really wanted some of those documents. His lawyers turned over a number of documents after he left. That fell into the "no harm no foul" of the earlier bit. Then it turned out there were some glaring omissions, so the archives requested those. Trump's lawyers turned over some of the documents, but were still stonewalling. Even if they drew this out as long as they were cooperating it's likely this would have gone down without anyone else knowing. They didn't cooperate though, so that's when the archives escalated it up to the DoJ, which culminated in the raid on his house after months of getting nowhere. Normal joe schmoe is going to jail at this point, but nope for Trump (and probably others too). On top of that... it turns out that there were more documents that didn't get turned over.
The real reason he's being prosecuted isn't because he walked out with a few classified documents - it turns out he ordered people to deliberately hide them AFTER they were requested, and move them again after the raid had occurred. At this point it isn't "Silly Donald, you forgot these documents" it's "holy shit he's actually being a dumbass on purpose." When the courts order you to do something, you do it. Neglecting to do it is one thing if you can pawn the responsibility off on someone else (which is what Hillary did - it was documented she requested the deletion well before she was subpoenaed and that the deletion occurred after the subpoena was issued was done without her direction by the employee of the hosting company), but purposefully circumventing a court order at the highest levels is going to get you in a lot of hot water. If Trump/his team had just fully complied with the initial requests he wouldn't have been in any trouble despite taking the documents and no one would have known because his property would never have been raided. The raid happened many months after the initial stonewalling and we didn't know until then.
All of this also ignores any other potential violations - like if the rumors he gave some info away to foreign powers or showed it to others were true. I assume they're not and just people looking to find more reason to slander him, but we'll find out I guess. If there is evidence he leaked classified docs, that's another much bigger can of worms.
. The argument can now be made that he should have gotten his 3rd MVP.