Comment by tbrownaw
7 months ago
> (Not on topic, but from the other side of the Atlantic, how on earth did the US go from "her emails/lock her up" being a rallying cry to electing the guy who stacked piles of classified documents in his bathroom?)
The private email server in question was set up for the purpose of circumventing records retention/access laws (the example, whoever handles answering FOIA requests won't be able to scan it). It wasn't primarily about keeping things after she should have lost access to them, it was about hiding those things from review.
The classified docs in the other example were mixed in with other documents in the same boxes (which says something about how well organized the office being packed up was); not actually in the bathroom from that leaked photo that got attached to all the news articles; and taken while the guy who ended up with them had the power to declassify things.
That's spinning it pretty nicely. The problem with what he did is that 1) having the power to declassify something doesn't just make it declassified, there is actually a process, 2) he did not declassify with that process when he had the power to do so, just declared later that keeping the docs was allowed as a result, and 3) he was asked a couple times for the classified documents and refused. If he had just let the national archives come take a peek, or the FBI after that, it would have been a non-issue. Just like every POTUS before him.