Trump Owes It All to McConnell’s ‘Disgraceful Dereliction of Duty’
"One year ago, the U.S. Senate voted to acquit Donald Trump, who just a couple of weeks earlier had been the President of the United States. Three years from now, he could be that again, thanks to the Republicans who knew better but nonetheless let him off the hook.
The vote was 57-43 in favor of convicting Trump for inciting the Capitol riot. This was the citizen militia portion of Trump’s months-long attempted coup, which had begun in earnest when he convinced tens of millions of Americans of the bald-faced lie that a massive, multi-state conspiracy of voter fraud had denied him re-election."
I'm at least somewhat convinced that McConnell almost voted to convict, but realized his caucus wouldn't get the votes. As his party's leader in the Senate, the political calculus wasn't worth it for a mere symbolic vote, and he changed his mind.
There were multiple stories from early February 2021 suggesting McConnell was willing to convict. He had a strong condemnation of Trump and supported impeachment in general.
I think it's more likely that he wouldn't have, but I could also see a reality where he saw the best option for the party was to cut ties and rip the bandaid off and rebuild. Everything is political calculus with him and Trump was always an inconvenient obstacle he had to work around.
If the twice impeached former president is found guilty of destroying federal records :
Title 18, Section 2071, of the US Code.
Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.
Which leads us to this:
SURPRISE: SOME OF THE DOCUMENTS TRUMP TRIED TO HIDE AT MAR-A-LAGO WERE ACTUALLY PRETTY IMPORTANT
"As you’ve probably heard by now, Donald Trump has a problem with paper. Specifically at issue is the fact that he spent his four years in office (1) regularly shredding presidential documents (2) possibly flushing some down the toilet, and (3) absconding to Mar-a-Lago with more than a dozen boxes containing presidential records that were not his to take. And as it turns out, he wasn’t just hanging on to knickknacks and personal mementos!"
From the TPM source Vanity Fair used:
"Meadows also dismissed any comparison between Trump taking potentially classified documents to Mar-A-Lago and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton using her personal email server, arguing that the latter was more damning because Clinton was investigated.
“When a lot of that was actually happening with Hillary Clinton, there was actually an investigation. There were subpoenas,” he said."
So the reason it's not a big deal is... because it hasn't been investigated? And I guess he thinks it shouldn't be investigated because it's not serious? Because it hasn't been investigated?
These people are something man...
Republicans Who Railed About Clinton Emails Are Quiet on Trump’s Records
"Donald J. Trump once thundered that the questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server were “bigger than Watergate.” On his 2016 presidential campaign, “where are her emails?” became a Republican rallying cry that was soon replaced with an even more threatening demand: “Lock her up.”"
This is standard, when it came out there were those using literal private emails, phones., etc while fulfilling their roles, of course that was fine in their eyes. Taking home and keeping confidential and top secret documents is also perfectly fine for the gop.
Also, trumps excuse is bs. Idea of not knowing the legality of it makes zero sense. If you have your lawyers and the archives going back and forth multiple times, yeah clearly you know. If it was oh hey, we need to keep those so can you return them (and they did), that would be a different story. But clearly trump was wanting to keep documents and given how they essentially ransacked the WH on their way out, no surprise here.
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