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Late yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump published an item to his social media platform, declaring that he’s been “totally exonerated” in the classified documents scandal that led to his federal indictment. Of course, the former president has long struggled with the meaning of the word “exonerated,” so the missive wasn’t too surprising.
But as part of the same all-caps message — which included Trump suggesting the authorities should give him back the documents he stole from the White House — the Republican said he should now be in the clear thanks to “the Clinton Socks case.” He made the same point during his weird speech on Tuesday night in New Jersey:
“I had every right to have these documents. The crucial legal precedent is laid out in the most important case ever on the subject known as the Clinton socks case.”
When Trump references this in writing, as he often does, he invariably capitalizes “Socks.” This, of course, has led to questions about whether he’s confused about the grammatical rules — the former president tends to capitalize random words he finds important — or whether he thinks the story relates to the former Clinton family cat.
Either way, if Trump still thinks the “socks” case helps him, he’s mistaken.
Revisiting our earlier coverage from last summer, Bill Clinton, during his White House tenure, spoke at some length with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, and as part of the project, there were many recordings of their conversations. According to one 2007 account, tapes were at one point stored in a sock drawer.
A conservative group called Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit, demanding that Clinton be forced to turn over the recordings. In 2012, a federal court rejected the organization’s claims, concluding that the tapes were personal records, not official presidential materials.
Trump would now have people believe this precedent helps him. It does not.
As NBC News reported last year, the 2012 court ruling “explicitly states that the Presidential Records Act distinguishes presidential records from ‘personal records,’ defined as documents that are ‘purely private or nonpublic character.’”
In contrast, Trump took highly sensitive national security secrets to his glorified country club. To see the two as comparable is to overlook every relevant detail.
University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney and an MSNBC legal analyst, had a great Twitter thread on this yesterday, calling the former president’s argument “nonsensical”:
...Clinton’s recordings were from his own interviews, qualifying as diaries, which the Presidential Records Act says are not presidential records. No law precluded Clinton from keeping them. Trump is charged not with violating the Presidential Records Act, but instead with violating the Espionage Act. The records Trump is alleged to have illegally retained are agency records, such as records of the CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense, not presidential records.
How does any of this relate to “the Clinton Socks case.” It doesn’t. Trump will need to think of something else the next time he wants to pretend he's been "exonerated."