Op-Ed: The swamp’s process of punishing Trump

This article originally appeared in The Washington Times on June 20, 2023

The indictment of former President Donald Trump for allegedly violating federal laws regarding records and classifications is a watershed in the history of the republic — and not for the reasons touted by his enemies.

What emerges from the case, as we know it, is not really a novel or unprecedented picture of a former officeholder who got crosswise with records law. Those episodes are much more common than the public realizes, involving nearly every major elected official who ends up under sufficient scrutiny.

Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have all been found at various points to have had documents in their possession that either the Department of Justice or the National Archives and Records Administration believed they should not.

This is partly because of the rampant overclassification of federal government documents — a known and apparently unsolvable problem in the D.C. ecosystem — and partly because the legitimate needs, or entirely understandable desires, of the figures involved made document access otherwise unreasonably onerous.

We should pause here and note that there are cases in which the alleged document retention was an undeniable effort to evade legitimate scrutiny and ordinary record-keeping — in other words, a real case of criminal intent.

Read full op-ed in The Washington Times