Justice Department via AP
This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records being stored on the stage in the White and Gold Ballroom at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
On Thursday last week, Donald Trump became the first former president in American history to be indicted on federal felony charges. He’s already under indictment in New York state court for allegedly falsifying business records, but now he’s facing seven more counts of violating the Espionage Act by willfully retaining national defense secrets, making false statements, and obstructing justice.
It remains to be seen how this will all play out in court, and keep in mind, there are still more criminal investigations into Trump under way. But for now, we can conclude that nobody in history has ever deserved this specific charge more than Donald Trump. Roughly half of the Republican presidential campaign in 2016 was centered around constant, wild exaggerations of Hillary Clinton’s violation of document retention rules, creating the impression of major corruption. To further that narrative, Trump signed a law in 2018 strengthening penalties for mishandling classified documents. And he has personally called on numerous occasions for people to be thrown in prison for supposedly leaking classified information.
Physician, imprison thyself.
Now, to be clear, Hillary Clinton did violate government document rules while serving as secretary of state, by using a private email server instead of a government one for official communications, and failing to hand over copies of those emails before leaving office. (She did that afterward.)
But while (as usual for the Clintons) this was careless and irresponsible, it ultimately was not a huge deal. Multiple extensive investigations failed to find criminal wrongdoing on the part of either her or her staff. And when it comes to classified documents, as my colleague David Dayen writes, the relevant rules are so ludicrously complex and sweeping that it’s practically impossible for high officials to avoid violating them by accident, as both Joe Biden and Mike Pence seem to have done. Only a couple of emails in the vast Clinton archive were actually marked as classified, and none of them contained sensitive information.
What Trump allegedly did was very different. According to the indictment, after leaving office in 2021, Trump allegedly took numerous boxes of documents, many of them classified, back to his Mar-a-Lago estate, in violation of presidential archiving and classification rules. He proceeded to store them all over the place, including a bathroom. In July 2021, in a recorded meeting with a writer and publisher (who did not have security clearances), Trump showed a classified “plan of attack” that he said had been prepared by the military. He told them it was “highly confidential” and “secret,” adding that “as president I could have declassified,” but “now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.” Then in August or September, Trump showed a representative of his personal PAC “a classified map related to a military operation, and told the representative that he should not be showing it to” him or her.
When the National Archives and Records Administration got wind of the missing documents, it demanded them back, but Trump tried to avoid doing so, and only handed over 15 boxes of papers in January 2022 after a lengthy negotiation. When archivists started going through the boxes, per the indictment, they discovered 197 classified documents. That led the FBI to open a criminal investigation in March 2022, in part to see if he had even more. Trump allegedly obstructed this investigation by suggesting his attorney lie to the FBI about not having the documents, or hide or destroy them; telling his valet to move them around; and handing over only some of the documents while falsely certifying that he had turned them all over. Sure enough, in August an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago found 102 more classified documents, including 17 marked Top Secret.
Nobody in history has ever deserved this specific charge more than Donald Trump.
Trump argued in his defense that he had declassified everything at Mar-a-Lago as president. But not only is that legally dubious—there is a process for declassification, and no indication that Trump followed it while in office, and in any case he still would not be allowed to keep the material—we now allegedly know that Trump himself admitted he did not declassify at least some of the documents.
Hmm, I wonder what former President Donald Trump—who signed a law stiffening the penalty for wrongly moving classified material from a misdemeanor with a maximum one-year prison sentence to a felony with a five-year maximum—might say about this kind of behavior? At CNN, Andrew Kaczynski and Samantha Woodward have compiled the many, many occasions that Trump has called for people to be locked up for mishandling classified information—including not only Hillary Clinton, but also former FBI Director James Comey, and his own former national security adviser John Bolton.
Accusing other people of crimes while doing them himself with reckless abandon—that sure sounds like Trump alright.
In any case, as I have previously argued, this indictment barely scratches the surface of Trump’s worst apparent crimes—in particular his attempt to overthrow the government and the Constitution by force. In a sane world, he would have been clapped in irons for seditious conspiracy and rebellion on January 21, 2021. (Investigations into Trump’s role in trying to overturn the election and inciting the Capitol Riot on January 6th are still ongoing.) And despite the apparent confession on tape, a conviction is not at all guaranteed either, because the case has been initially assigned to Trump appointee Judge Aileen Cannon, who has already bent over backwards to help Trump in other cases (which earned her a harsh reprimand from the 11th Circuit).
But if anyone deserves to go to jail for classified document crimes, it’s Trump. This isn’t someone who got caught up in the byzantine classification system. If the government account is at all accurate, he willfully attempted to disobey the law, repeatedly, and as we learn now, seemingly admitted to doing so. It’s a hundred times worse than anything Hillary Clinton did. Time for a taste of his own prison medicine.
