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I can agree with this on the one hand, in that if some random sovereign citizen pulled these same stunts the system would come down on them like a ton of bricks - but I think a lot of these actual prosecutions are very much not "being treated with kid gloves on". I'd reserve that phrase for the treatment that Hillary Clinton got with her email "matter", or that Hunter Biden got with his crack/guns/lying on government forms/corruption/unregistered foreign agent activity/tax avoidance/driving on crack. My reading of the situation is that the DOJ wants to crush Trump by any means necessary, they're just scared of the pushback they'll get for being too nakedly corrupt which is forcing them to temper their approach.
These disputes come up regularly here and they generally get stuck in an unresolvable mire. I don't know any obvious solutions, because whatever distinction one side mentions gets dismissed as irrelevant or immaterial by the other side. Maybe one possible solution is to list out a list of objective metrics and only then figure out how to apply them to each situation. For example in the context of "mishandling classified information" we can maybe outline as metrics: number of documents, sensitivity of information, whether there was any recalcitrance, whether there was any dishonesty or fraud involved, what the motive was, whether there were any justifications, etc etc. The goal here is to avoid the all-too-common tactic of glossing over incriminating factors and highlighting only exculpatory.
I also don't think this is really resolvable either. If you can come up with a good rubric for determining the harm caused by misuse of classified information you're not even halfway there to determining the ultimate cost - was Hillary's email server the source of the leak which led to China rolling up most of the CIA's agents there? I don't know, and I don't think it's even possible for someone without access to a lot of classified information to find out. At the same time, my understanding of Trump's motives for retaining classified documents was that they contained proof of government malfeasance in Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probe it turned into. Those documents would have been extremely sensitive and had immense consequences if they were released to the public - but the specifics of the situation are so unique that I don't think looking at these two instances and going "Well, Clinton's mistake revealed a bunch of SAPs and lead to all of the CIA's chinese sources being tortured and killed, but Trump had more pieces of paper with NOFORN on them so despite nothing happening as a result his actions were worse" is in any way conducive to gaining a clearer understanding of what happened. This just isn't the kind of question where objective measures are particularly useful or even easy to acquire.
That said, I do think that there's some kind of objective metric where you can compare the actual negative impacts of Trump's retaining of classified documents in accordance with long-standing tradition as opposed to Hillary's compromised-by-foreign-powers email server specifically designed to evade FOIA scrutiny. But as my framing of the issue gives away, my own bias is for populists and against the establishment, so I'm definitely not going to be able to come up with it.
Woah that's crazy, how do you know this?
I don't know it and can't prove it (and I also think there could be more documents unrelated to it included), but that's the only set of documents I can think of that fit the category "Trump declassified these but the government disagreed". It's likely that he also took some other stuff, like Presidents seem to do normally, but those are the documents that seem most likely to be retained. That said I don't actually know for certain - I'm sorry for being unclear with my language and giving a higher confidence level to that information than was warranted.
No worries, I really appreciate you clearing it up.
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