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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I think like the documents case affecting Trump, the situation depends quite a lot on two questions: what did the person actually have, and how much security did they have in place to protect it.

If the emails contained nothing of consequence, then it’s a crime certainly, but the damage done to the country by them being hacked is pretty minimal. If all Trump took from the WH were secret recipes for really good steaks, it really isn’t going to hurt anyone. Within any office environment are papers with varying degrees of security and even within that there are things that are controlled that really aren’t that important or useful to other companies. New products in development are important to guard. Proprietary processes and technologies are important to guard. There might be other things like marketing plans that are less important. Not that they can be leaked with impunity, but there wouldn’t be nearly as much harm actually done by them getting out. In the realm of statecraft, things like the names and locations of spies, military intelligence, military technology, strategic planning, etc. are extremely important to keep secret. Dirt on heads of state, including our own might be embarrassing, but unlikely to be fatal.

The other question would be the security of those offsite storage facilities. How hard is it to crack Hillary’s server? How hard is it to get into the closet Trump had documents in? If the security was lax, it seems like such a thing should be treated like a leak. Not because we can prove it actually happened, but because the security was so light that anyone with the slightest understanding of security would know that the server or closet was almost certain to be breeched at some point. My understanding of the server was that it was basically an off the shelf Outlook server protected with a password. Trump had the documents in closets and empty rooms a Mar-a-Lago which is a facility with lots of staff and probably multiple keys to every room in the place and few other security features to keep people out of those rooms. In either case, I think it fair to treat that type of security as no security at all.

You should also consider that Hillary was doing what she did in the course of her duties as SecState and was permitted (stupidly) to have the server. She complied with the investigation.

Trump took very sensitive documents because he wanted to own them. He did not comply with the investigation.

Trump is being prosecuted because there was no way to let this level of violation slide.

It’s mostly about two things:

  1. The sensitivity of the info.
  2. How badly/brazenly/irresponsibly rules were broken.

The Hillary server was known to the State Department and others in government because she used it for her job. It was a bad idea and poorly executed, but clearly de facto permitted. The emails were not classified, but upon investigation some of them had content should have been.

This last bit is not a result of the server; it’s a result of the State Department constantly straddling classified and unclassified worlds. I have no idea if Hillary and her close associates were more or less irresponsible than average people in her position because we don’t have investigation results to compare. I do know that the classification business is a pain in the ass and can involve judgement calls that are easier in hindsight.

Trump, on the other hand, absconded with dozens of boxes of highly classified documents, as if he wanted a personal collection. We know he talked about them and shared them, and not for official US government business. And when the US government asked for them back, he put up a fight. If he had just given them back the chance it would have gone any further was very low.

The remarkable bit is that the president is the absolute classification authority and Trump (falsely) claims he had declassified them. Now, if he had gone the formal declassification route then that would have been a scandal (declassifying sensitive things because you want them in your collection is not a good luck), but he wouldn’t have broken the law. (At least, I’m pretty sure there is no legal restraint on a president declassifying things because it’s an executive branch program; the reason congress is so cavalier with classified data is because they can’t be prosecuted for breaking those rules.)

Hillary made mistakes. Trump (almost certainly) committed a crime.