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Notes -
It’s mostly about two things:
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.
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