Former President Donald Trump insists that he’s being unjustly criminalized for retaining documents from his time in office, while his predecessors and political opponents are being let off the hook for the same behavior. But that’s just not the case. Though other politicians have previously retained documents without legal consequences, Trump’s case differs in key ways, and that’s what drove prosecutors to seek the extraordinary federal charges against him.
In his first public remarks following his arraignment on 37 federal charges Tuesday, Trump made a series of inapt comparisons to cases involving his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, his onetime vice president Mike Pence, and President Joe Biden. All four have faced questions about holding on to records related to their public service. If they weren’t indicted for retaining documents, he claims, then the only plausible conclusion is that he’s been singled out as the victim of yet another “witch hunt.”
That narrative might convince his followers to dismiss the indictment. But it’s false: None of those figures ignored a subpoena to turn over classified material concerning highly sensitive matters of national security and then sought to conceal it from federal officials and their own attorneys, as is alleged of Trump. And in fact, history suggests that if Trump complied with that request, as some of his peers did, prosecutors may not have pressed charges.
The case against Trump is not so much about the fact that he retained documents he had no right to keep — but that he allegedly did so knowingly and brazenly defying the federal government while putting US interests at risk. That puts Trump in a class of his own.
What happened in the Clinton emails case
The Clinton emails case became a flashpoint in the 2016 presidential race. Then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton used a private email server located in her home as secretary of…
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