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To hear Donald Trump and his Republican allies tell it, the Justice Department is engaged in a dramatic abuse by prosecuting the former president. Federal law enforcement, the argument goes, could’ve shown great discretion, but federal prosecutors instead went after the Republican with everything they had.
GOP partisans won’t want to hear this, but this version of events gets reality backward. “As a matter of fact,” New York magazine’s Eric Levitz explained yesterday, “the federal government has been affording Trump extraordinary leniency, likely as a product of political considerations.” From his report:
In January of last year, Trump returned 197 classified documents to the federal government. Despite his willfully retaining those documents for months, the federal indictment released last week does not charge Trump in connection with any of them — which is to say, the DOJ gave Trump a pass on 197 potential counts of willful retention of national defense information. Instead, it charged him with only 31 counts, each corresponding with a highly classified document that Trump knowingly withheld from the government in January 2022 and the FBI later obtained.
MSNBC’s Jen Psaki described this yesterday as “a fact I don’t see out there enough,” and it’s an important point. For all the recent hysterics in GOP politics, it’s hardly outrageous to argue that federal prosecutors have gone easy on Trump.
When Trump left the White House, he took a great many classified documents — which didn’t belong to him, and which he wasn’t supposed to have — and there’s ample evidence to suggest he did so deliberately. Indeed, the former president ignored the National Archives’ requests for the documents’ return.
The Republican ultimately agreed to give part of his collection back to the authorities, but by that point, the crime had apparently already been committed: He willfully took sensitive materials and held them for over a year, even as he blew off officials who hoped he’d be more responsible.
This could’ve been part of the indictment. In fact, others have faced federal prosecutions for similar-but-less-egregious conduct. If he weren’t a former president, it’s quite likely he would have been charged for having illegally held so many classified documents he wasn’t supposed to have for so long.
But the Justice Department didn’t give Trump so much as a slap on the wrist for this: He returned many of the documents, and for prosecutors, that was good enough. If federal law enforcement were out to “get” the former president, this leniency wouldn’t have happened.
Trump was instead charged because of the classified documents he refused to give back — a step Mike Pence, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden never even considered taking — effectively forcing the Justice Department’s hand.