As the investigation into Donald Trump’s classified documents scandal nears its endpoint, the former president and his lawyers are still scrambling to find a compelling defense. Increasingly, they’re focused on the idea that the Republican’s predecessors did the same thing he did — and if they weren’t prosecuted, Trump shouldn’t be either.
James Trusty, one of the former president’s lawyers, appeared on CNN last night, for example, and echoed one of his client’s favorite lines:
“Here’s the thing: What we’ve built into the system is there are years of conversation — typically years of conversation — about whether or not certain documents are personal or presidential, OK? [Barack] Obama, 2018, wrote a letter, his foundation wrote a letter to [the National Archives] saying, ‘We have thousands of classified documents. We’ll get them to you eventually.’”
As part of the same on-air discussion, Trusty added, “I’m talking about dual systems of justice.”
This again?
If the idea that Obama did something roughly equivalent to Trump sounds at all familiar, it’s because the Republican and his operation have been working on this for nearly a year.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, three days after the FBI executed a court-approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Trump wrote on his social media platform, “I continue to ask, what happened to the 33 Million pages of documents taken to Chicago by President Obama?” The next morning, he added, “President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
The problem, of course, is that the whole argument was, and remains, absurd. The Washington Post explained last summer:
As was reported back in late 2016, the Obama team was transferring the records to Chicago through the National Archives, which legally owns the documents once a president leaves office. Once the documents ultimately reached a warehouse in…
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