What about (insert name)?
The prevailing conservative reaction to the indictment of Donald Trump for absconding with classified documents and seeking to cover it up was to ask, “yeah, but what about” so-and-so.
The so-and-sos were Hunter and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
Hunter Biden is under investigation on allegations of various low-life activities and might yet be charged. He’s not an office-holder and has nothing personally to do with national government issues, except perhaps for profiting with other Biden family members from their relative’s position.
They can put Hunter in jail in Batesville on that child-support matter for all I care.
Joe Biden had classified documents at his home, too, but apparently unwittingly. More importantly, he had them retrieved by the government immediately upon discovery—and his home checked further. That’s much preferable to lying about such documents, showing them off while admitting they’re top secret and hiding some from government agents.
Hillary? Raging Republicans may have something there.
She, possessed of chronic bunker mentality, acted while secretary of state to take her emails off a government server and onto her own home server. Then she deleted thousands we were told without verification were personal. Then audits indicated that a little of what flowed across that server appeared to have been “top secret’ at least in part.
She didn’t set up the home server specifically to hoard classified documents, but to guard that “zone of privacy” she had been staking out implausibly for decades. Nothing on it seemed to jeopardize the government.
The FBI said she had acted recklessly though it chose not to charge her—criminal intent seeming to be nonexistent, according to the busybody in charge of the FBI at the time, James Comey.
That’s less than what Trump did. He ran off with plainly classified documents. He showed them off and deceitfully had some moved when federal agents came to get his inappropriate stash.
But it was all close enough for the playground-caliber tactic of whataboutism, which is the favorite defense available in contemporary American partisan politics.
A key factor to remember is that citizens sitting on a federal grand jury returned the indictment of Trump. And citizens sitting on a trial jury will have to decide the case.
Citizens did it.
A partisan prosecution puts much at stake for the one prosecuting, who must persuade your friends and neighbors. South Florida has a history, Politico reports, of acquitting public officials charged with crimes.
The most vigorous Trump critic in the Republican presidential field is the former Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson. He’s also a former federal prosecutor, congressman, Clinton impeachment manager, private attorney, national drug-enforcement head and second-ranking official in homeland security.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Hutchinson gave a “well-received speech” Saturday morning at the Georgia State Republican Convention.
Speaking with reporters afterward, he warned that the GOP “should not lose its soul” defending Trump. He said the facts suggest Trump treated top-secret government documents “like entertainment tools.” He said Trump ought to drop out of the race.
After reading that account Saturday morning, I texted this question to Hutchinson: “What do you have to say from benefit of your experience to members of your party who, other factors aside, are primarily outraged at what they see as selective prosecution particularly in the somewhat similar matter of Hillary Clinton’s email server the FBI said was handled carelessly when she was secretary of state?”
He promptly replied by correcting my “carelessly” to the record’s “recklessly,” and saying; “I agree with that concern and outrage. Selective prosecution understandably creates moral outrage but it does not change the legal jeopardy of Trump. I have tried to use selective prosecution as a defense legal argument, and it doesn’t work. Trump will have his day in court and may be found not guilty, but it remains a legitimate issue for 2024 as to how a commander-in-chief will protect our nation’s secrets.”
In other words: That Hillary might well have been indicted in 2016 is no reason Trump shouldn’t have been indicted in 2023. That a car up ahead in traffic was speeding without sanction will not change the radar gun’s finding on you.
It should be pointed out that the FBI’s cutting slack did not help Clinton in the end. Instead it hurt her, especially when Comey deemed it advisable to reopen the matter in the last days of the campaign to announce that a new batch of emails had been found.
Conversely, Democrats aren’t hurting Trump, but helping—at least in his chances for the nomination—by indicting him from New York to Miami.
It seems possible, then, that Trump is being indicted for appropriate reasons of law without regard for the politics and that Hillary was spared indictment but not a fate worse for her, meaning the home detention of political defeat.