Parsing J.D. Vance and his defense of Trump

 

Senator J.D. Vance defends Trump.

The question of whether Trump should have kept those documents is fundamentally a political question.

No, it isn’t. The bulk of the 37 charges are “31 counts of willful retention of classified documents.” When off-going presidents depart the White House, the on-coming president routinely grants them top-secret security clearances so that the former president can provide advice to the current president. The clearance is granted “...as a perk granted by the current president (which Biden hasn't done for Trump)."

Such access is therefore only granted at the discretion and explicit permission of a sitting president. Beyond that, as the Presidential Records Act states, "Presidential records automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist as soon as the President leaves office."

So yes, Trump has broken the law and it is a legal question.

Vance’s political opponents “...have taken this position: unelected bureaucrats can throw the elected president in prison...”

When a president’s term in office expires, his or her legal status is pretty much just like that of any other citizen. He gets Secret Service protection, but I’m not aware of any other official perks. Interestingly, Vance agrees that Biden is not using the legal system to prevent Trump from running again. The Justice Department is acting independently and not as a tool of the current president.

Maybe you think he should have kept the documents in a safe. Fine.

Heh! If you look at the photos of the boxes and boxes of documents, keeping them secure would have required first moving them all to a, or to multiple, commercial storage unit(s) (At the usual maximum, they come in 10’ x 30’ or 20’ x 20’). After that, had I been an adviser to Trump, I would have recommended that Trump build a separate building, perhaps the size of my one-bedroom apartment, up to SCIF standards, to hold the documents and to allow detailed sorting and indexing.

What Trump said about his legal ability to hold onto documents from his presidency, whether classified or not, is important as it shows “state of mind.” Those statements matter because they show that he was fully aware that he did NOT have the legal right to hold onto ANY of the documents that the National Archives took back.

...if the opposition can use the legal system like this with no consequence…

This contradicts Vance’s earlier statement that “unelected bureaucrats” were picking on the former president.