Quote (IceMage @ Jun 10 2023 05:51am)
The most obvious reason why Trump's case is different from the rest is that he obstructed justice. The indictment outlines how he intentionally hid classified documents from the lawyer who was tasked with going through all the boxes and retrieving all documents with classified markings. He allowed another lawyer to make a false representation to the government that all documents with classified markings were sent back, when Trump knew that was a lie.
You'll notice in the indictment that none of the Espionage Act charges are for documents that were returned to the government... they all apply to documents the FBI retrieved in it's raid, ones that Trump concealed from the government.
That falls apart because 1) that's a common element with the Hillary Clinton case, because she destroyed evidence to try to 'obstruct justice' and 2) The prosecutors are not specifically charging only in the case of the documents they could not find nor just the cases of Trump on tape talking about them being secret, they're charging for all the documents, the rest without such elements. And that would hold Biden and Pence being guilty, since the charge doesn't require obstruction, rather the strict liability of possessing classified materials without authorization. They retrieved documents from Biden's house after he said there were none, just the same.
Quote
It's also ridiculous to conclude that this was a harmless crime, because the way these boxes were moved all over Mar a Lago(some were sent to New Jersey), it's really not knowable whether the government retrieved all classified documents that Trump took from the White House, or whether the ones he had were looked at by other unauthorized people.
We don't know how many people Donald Trump had murdered and how many bodies he made disappear and covered up without a trace, either. When you charge a crime with no evidence of harm, you can't allege unknown harms from it. That's just baseless speculation.
Quote
Another reason why Trump's case is different is he knowingly showed classified documents to randos without authorization to see them. There's no such example with Hillary, Pence, or Biden.
Showing classified documents to randos without authorization doesn't seem as harmful as showing classified documents to hostile Chinese hackers who got in your email server.
But Trump already possessed the knowledge of those documents and was free to tell people exactly what was on them, and while president he had total plenary authority to declassify them and show anyone he wanted. How those powers transfer between presidents is not all a clear matter of law, never tested in courts, and can't clearly adhere to some absolutist interpretion that the successor decides everything, else we'd need each president to line-item approve/disapprove his predecessor's records as they're taken out.