Will GOP Demand Trump Go To Email Jail For Shredding And Stealing Government Docs? LOL.

It's allllll projection with these people.

"What if Hillary ..." is not a productive game. Republicans operate in such blatantly bad faith that they tried to pin an attack on a US embassy halfway around the world on her. But it is pretty breathtaking to behold the GOP's total lack of interest in Donald Trump's continuous and deliberate violation of the Presidential Records Act after the party spent the past eight years braying to put Clinton in email jail for setting up a server in her basement.

The Washington Post has back-to-back stories on the former president's utter disregard for federal records retention statutes. The first on Saturday described Trump's habit of ripping up documents, despite being told repeatedly by "two chiefs of staff" that every piece of paper and electronic communication in the White House must be forwarded to the National Archives for preservation. (That would be Reince Priebus and John Kelly, since Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows were more famous for the flexibility of their spines than for standing up to their boss.)

The ripping was so relentless that Trump’s team implemented protocols to try to ensure that he was abiding by the Presidential Records Act. Typically, aides from either the Office of the Staff Secretary or the Oval Office Operations team would come in behind Trump to retrieve the piles of torn paper he left in his wake, according to one person familiar with the routine. Then, staffers from the White House Office of Records Management were generally responsible for jigsawing the documents back together, using clear tape.

LOL, remember when Obama pissed on the troops by saluting while holding a cup of coffee?

Worse, Trump and his minions routinely put documents in burn bags to be disposed of — it's unclear whether to hide their dirty deeds, for the sheer joy of flouting the law, or something else — forcing staff to spend hours each week pawing through both the trash and classified materials, hunting down and taping documents back together. Indeed, the January 6 Select Committee has reportedly received documents from the National Archives that were shredded and taped back together.

And no, before you ask, no one is going to jail over this shit. There's no enforcement mechanism for the statute because it never occurred to Congress that there would be such a blatantly lawless president. This represents either a failure of imagination, or perhaps an overestimation of the wise judgment of the American people. Probably both.

The second story has the National Archives taking a field trip to Mar-a-Lago last month to pick up documents the former president accidentally retained — i.e. STOLE — from the White House.

Trump advisers deny any nefarious intent and said the boxes contained mementos, gifts, letters from world leaders and other correspondence. The items included correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which Trump once described as “love letters,” as well as a letter left for his successor by President Barack Obama, according to two people familiar with the contents.

Ewww, remember when the former president thought he was going steady with North Korea's murderous dictator? WTF even was that?

Let's go out on a limb here and guess Republicans would hold months of hearings and demand jail time for this shit if the shoe was on the other foot. But when you've already shrugged off an effort to extort a foreign leader to investigate your presidential rival, not to mention a coup attempt, what's a little theft and destruction of government property between friends, right?

Laws are for the little people.

“I don’t think he did this out of malicious intent to avoid complying with the Presidential Records Act,” a former Trump White House official told the Post . “As long as he’s been in business, he’s been very transactional and it was probably his longtime practice and I don’t think his habits changed when he got to the White House.”

You'll pardon us if that sounds a lot like "once a criminal, always a criminal" to us.

[ WaPo / WaPo ]

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