Robert wrote: ↑Tue Jun 13, 2023 10:59 pm
What wrong doing with Trump are you talking about?
Trump is not being indicted for any classified documents that he retained and then later returned to the government after they were discovered. He is only being indicted for documents that he refused to return and then willfully obstructed their return through various illegal acts. The DOJ and special prosecutor actually went easy on Trump for political reasons compared to how they would have treated a more ordinary civilian. Here is a summary from New York Magazine:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06 ... biden.html
Upon leaving office, the ex-president brought more than 300 highly classified documents to his private residences, including top-secret materials detailing atomic secrets and national security vulnerabilities; he retained these documents for about a year despite government requests for him to return them. His own public statements indicate that his retention of those documents was willful, and he repeatedly expressed a sense of entitlement to their possession, saying that, as president, he had the power to declassify those materials “even by thinking about it.”
Nevertheless, as late as January 2022, the Justice Department was still giving Trump the opportunity to avoid charges by returning the documents he had taken. The indictment released last week makes this point clear.
In January of last year, in response to a subpoena, Trump returned 197 classified documents to the federal government. Despite his willfully retaining those documents for months, the federal indictment released last week does not charge Trump in connection with any of them — which is to say, the DOJ gave Trump a pass on 197 potential counts of willful retention of national defense information. Instead, it charged him with only 31 counts corresponding with the number of highly classified documents Trump knowingly withheld from the government in January 2022 and the FBI later obtained.
In other words, Trump held onto hundreds of classified documents for a year after leaving office, even after repeated requests for their return from the National Archives. He gave them back only after a subpoena. Even so, he did give them back, so the special prosecutor let the whole thing slide.
But then Trump practically forced their hand. Even after NARA requests, even after a subpoena, he held on to dozens more highly classified documents and did everything he possibly could to hide them. The government got them back only after the FBI seized them in a search of Mar-a-Lago months later.
This is the key difference between Trump, Biden, Pence, and Hillary Clinton. Biden had a few classified documents in his possession after his vice presidency, but he promptly and voluntarily returned them when they turned up in a search. Ditto for Pence. Hillary never had any classified documents at all, merely some private email conversations that were mostly about things that were unclassified at the time but were later retroactively classified by the CIA in a routine feud with the State Department over classification standards.
And compared to how the DOJ has treated other more ordinary civilians for similar deliberate retention of classified documents, Trump is getting off easy.
