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You keep mixing legal arguments with moral ones. Even if we accept that what Trump did was legal (not conceded) you have conspicuously avoided the argument that it was deeply irresponsible. there is no law of physics which says that a former president cannot injure the nation by mishandling such documents. Even if a box in a garage is not as bad as an email on a server (not conceded) you still have to admit that a box in a garage is pretty goddamn bad. And after all that shit he gave Hillary, too. Is it really such a terrible thing to hold Trump to his own standards?
If we're going with moral arguments, I'd unfortunately have to say that the verdict almost certainly rests with a set of currently unknowable facts - the exact content of the various documents in question. Given the problems of overclassification, it's actually quite tricky to determine whether, and to what extent, each of the documents really was a danger to national security. Obviously, no one is going to come out and make a public appeal in the form of, "Oh come on, all the real content of Document A was already long past sensitive, even broadly published in the NYT already," or whatever. But frankly, if we're thinking about the moral standpoint, such considerations would actually be super important, and we just don't have a clue which way that goes.
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A box in a garage is certainly worse than an email server with regards to security (and this was a particularly insecure server, we'd be better off if she had used AOL, as a country). And even that is merely Biden. A private bathroom in a residence is even more secure. Even moreso when that residence has Secret Service security forces on the premises.
There is not even a slight implication that the US was harmed by Trump's document hoarding. There are multiple experts who believe that it is implausible that multiple foreign nations do not have mirrors of Hillary's server.
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Who cares if it was irresponsible if it was legal? Are we really going to break open Pandora's Box and start indicting presidents for doing things that are irresponsible? If so, great, because I have a long list of politicians who "injured the nation"...
Come on, don't lecture me about boxes in garages when Joe Biden has the same. Maybe if you start by admitting that this whole prosecution is made-up double standards over nonsense no one really cares about, in a long line of same, all directed against Trump, I'll concede that sometimes he acts stupidly.
I'll agree that if what he did was legal, he shouldn't have been indicted. I'm not at all convinced by your argument that what he did was legal, and even if you're correct, people sometimes get indicted for doing legal things; it's just a thing that happens sometimes.
He cared about it. That's what really gets my back up. 'Crooked Hillary's emails' was like his #1 talking point back in 2016. The man is the king of double standards.
As for unfairness, I think if Trump had done what any other politician would have done, and just handed over the documents when they asked instead of being deceitful, then this whole saga ends with Trump getting a sternly worded letter and a half-dozen news articles written about him. The way Trump acted makes this a very different situation. Of course, I'll admit it's possible that in my counterfactual he gets prosecuted anyway. But then your unfairness argument would be far easier to make, wouldn't it?
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