To formulate this case against the former president is itself a reduction of the subject to absurdity. There has been no suggestion, other than by the Trump-hating media, that the former president was careless with highly confidential material that could affect U.S. national security, and the photograph issued by the Department of Justice of a range of documents marked classified, spread out on a carpet of the former president’s home, as if he had left them in that place himself, is indicative of the desperation of the DOJ to cooper together some plausible complaint from the farrago of nonsense that it has stirred up.
A departing president can take copies of whatever he wants, as they were in his custody in an official capacity; he has an unlimited security clearance, and he can declassify, explicitly or otherwise, anything in his possession while he’s president. McCarthy’s laborious and slightly pedantic assault upon his caricatures of several of the ex-president’s counsels’ defense arguments don’t in themselves approach the necessary threshold of indicating that a crime was committed.
Note!