WASHINGTON (AP) — The year was 2016, the presidential candidate under investigation was Hillary Clinton and the FBI director at the time, James Comey, laid out…
Fast forward to 2022 and that tutorial proves instructive as another candidate from that election, Donald Trump, is entangled in an FBI probe related to sensitive government documents.
Much remains uncertain about Monday’s search, including precisely what documents the FBI was looking for — Trump says agents opened a safe — or why it acted when it did. But people familiar with the matter say it relates to an ongoing Justice Department investigation into the discovery of classified material in boxes of White House records the National Archives and Records Administration recovered from Mar-A-Lago earlier this year.
But if past is any precedent, the mere mishandling of classified information isn’t always enough for a felony conviction — or any charges at all. The FBI said as much in 2016 when it closed without recommending charges an investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information via a private email server she used as secretary of state. Comey said agents had determined that she had sent and received emails containing classified information but that there was no indication she had intended to break the law. He said no reasonable prosecutor would have brought such a case.
It remains to be seen what arguments Trump might raise as the investigation progresses. His lengthy statement disclosing the search did not address the substance of the probe, complaining instead that the FBI’s action was a “weaponization of the Justice System and an attack by Radical Left Democrats.”
But, law professor Vladeck said, it would be a “pretty stunning” argument by Trump to claim as his defense that he had “declassified all of our crown jewels” and, by doing so, effectively admit that he was a “threat to our national security.”
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