Trump’s Indictment Upends Decades of Lax Classified Docs Precedent—Hillary, Biden, & More Let Off for Similar “Crimes” | SYSTEM UPDATE #96
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, former President Donald Trump has been indicted yet again.
This time it comes from a federal grand jury charging him with seven felony counts relating to claims that he mishandled classified information by removing them from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and that he obstructed the DOJ probe by hiding relevant information and obstructing that investigation.
With his indictment, Trump's second after the 34 count set of charges filed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in April relating to bookkeeping entries from payments to former adult film star Stormy Daniels, Trump becomes the first ever president or former president in American history to face federal criminal charges.
Charges.
We will look at what we know about these charges.
The indictment was just recently unsealed earlier today, and the reason to suspect that this is little more than another instance of the establishment abusing its legal powers with the primary goal of rendering Trump ineligible to run for president in 2024, as almost all polls show him with a wide lead over all GOP challengers, as well as leading his direct matchup with Joe Biden in the general election.
On Monday night, tune in as we air our one-hour wide-ranging interview with Democratic Party presidential candidate RFK Jr.
We taped that interview earlier today and I found it very compelling and genuinely interesting, providing a deep look into how Joe Biden's leading primary challenger thinks and reasons about a variety of issues.
We'll have that Monday night at 7 p.m.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform where you can follow the show and rate and review each episode to help spread its visibility.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
An indictment was unsealed earlier today from the Southern District of Florida that charges former President Donald Trump with seven felony counts, five of which pertain to
allegations that he mishandled classified information when taking still-secret documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, where he then, according to the indictment, showed them to other people, even though they were still classified.
And two other counts that relate to his efforts to obstruct the DOJ investigation that was supervised by the Biden Justice Department and carried out by a special counsel.
Now, it probably is the case, based on everything we know, including Trump's own admissions, that he took documents that at least at one point had been deemed classified and that were still more classified when he left the White House, and he took those to Mar-a-Lago.
And under the law, you could make the case that that is technically illegal.
There is nobody in the United States with the power or the authority to take classified documents and show them to people who are not authorized to see them or even to take them out of classified settings.
Trump's defense, or one of his defenses, which we will get to, is that it is extremely odd, and we agree, to try and prosecute someone for mishandling classified information when that person, at the time they took them, was the President of the United States, which means, by definition, that he had the was the President of the United States, which means, by definition, that he had the absolute and unilateral and unreviewable power to There's no congressional act required.
There's no legal challenge available.
The President, at any time, has the power to classify information and to declassify information without having to explain or account to anybody for why he did that and without any act of Congress or any other regulatory body necessary.
And so Trump's argument, or one of them, is that prior to leaving the White House, he sort of waved a magic wand and said, I hereby declassified all these documents.
Or he said that to himself, and those documents presto became unclassified.
And therefore, he could not have broken the law by taking these unclassified materials or showing them to anybody else.
Now, we will get to the reason why At the very least, it does seem extremely strange to prosecute somebody who was President of the United States at the time they supposedly took these documents, even though they had the power to render them declassified at any time.
The President has total control over classified documents.
But I want to make a few observations first.
Before we get to both the indictment and to prior historical similar cases that I think really put this indictment into context and make clear that it is another case of the political establishment very scared that Donald Trump is going to run again in 2024 and win.
All polls right now show that he would.
And because they fear his return to the White House and believe they may not have a chance to defeat him politically, they thought they did in 2016 and he won, they were sure they were going to beat him in 2020 and he came.
It was a very close election.
And now they are, with Biden having to defend the status quo, with him being 82 years old, with him being obviously addled, are petrified that Trump will run and win again.
And one of the ways that establishments in other countries, we've seen this, Try to render people ineligible who they don't want to run is by concocting criminal charges against them and rendering them legally ineligible, or at least dirtying their name enough to make it impossible for them to run, where they almost have to run from a prison cell.
Which very well may be the case with President Trump, given not just this indictment, but the one that came in April from a Manhattan district attorney.
We just saw what happens when Trump has to face a Manhattan jury in the defamation case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who claims that Trump defamed her by denying that he sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
He lost that case.
So even though there are massive holes, legally speaking, in that case, which we covered on a prior show when the indictment was revealed, he could end up being convicted for that indictment.
He could end up being convicted for this current one.
And there's still the chance that he may be indicted because of speeches that he gave that the Biden Justice Department might want to say incited what they regard as the insurrection on January 6th.
Liberals are desperate for Merrick Garland to come up with an indictment against Trump for that.
So there's three possible cases, at least criminally, That he's facing and could very well put him in prison in 2024 and make him either run from prison for president or try and plea bargain his way out of those charges by agreeing not to run for president, which is very revealingly
What a major liberal TV personality suggested last night ought to happen, that they should let Trump out of these charges in exchange for his promise not to run in 2024, which clearly is the end goal for the establishment here.
Now Whenever it comes to the question of mishandling classified information, I want to make a few points because I have some personal experience in dealing with classified information as somebody who essentially read through a large archive, a massive archive of top-secret documents in the past, and had to make choices about which documents to publish and which ones not to publish, and somebody who has worked with sources who has faced the same challenges, including in the Snowden case and in WikiLeaks cases.
And one of the things I think it's so important to note is that in Washington, almost everything is deemed classified.
So all the time we hear, because the government wants us to think, that if a document is deemed classified or secret and especially top secret, it means that this is an incredibly sensitive document and that national security would be jeopardized if anybody were able to see it.
And yet, to say that that's untrue, that that's a fairy tale, is to put it mildly, the reality is one of the main problems we have in the United States is that the United States government reflexively makes everything that it does a secret, legally, to the point where it's a felony to reveal anything that they do.
If you think about it, in a healthy democracy, in a functioning republic, The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know essentially everything about what our government does.
There are some exceptions.
If they're ordering troop movements in a war, if there are documents about how to launch nuclear weapons, of course there are times where secrecy is appropriate, but that should be the exception, not the rule.
The rule should be We're supposed to know what our government is doing.
There's supposed to be transparency in how public power is being exercised.
That's why it's called the public sector.
It's supposed to be something that everyone can see how they're exercising their power, with very few exceptions.
Conversely, the government's not supposed to know anything about what we do as private citizens.
That's why we're called private citizens.
That's why the right to privacy is guaranteed in the Constitution.
That's why the founders emphasized all the protections that we had to have over the government's ability to learn things about us, to search our homes, to search our documents.
They could only do that with a search warrant.
Any finding a problem will cause.
So the framework in any healthy democracy is we know everything about what our government does and they know nothing about what we do.
And again, there are some exceptions to that as well.
The government is supposed to learn things about us.
If they can go to a court and show there's probable cause that we committed a crime, they get a search warrant, they can read our emails, listen to our phone calls.
But that's supposed to be the exception.
And what has happened in the United States is that that is completely reversed.
In the United States, almost everything the U.S.
government does is secret.
is taking place behind a wall of opaque lack of transparency.
We know almost nothing about what our government does because everything is done in the dark behind this wall of secrecy.
And at the same time, because of the ubiquitous surveillance state that has been implemented, the spying that is done by the NSA and the FBI, not only on people they get search warrants for, but on all of us, they know almost everything about what we do, about with whom we communicate, About how we use the internet, about with whom we're communicating, and oftentimes where we are.
And so this framework has been completely reversed.
And one of the reasons, one of the ways I first learned about that and started realizing that was when I started going through the Snowden archive.
And the Snowden Archive, the archive that he gave to me and Laura Poitras and other journalists, is an archive filled with hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more, taken from the NSA.
Many of them pertain to the CIA or the Pentagon or Homeland Security or Allied Intelligence Services and the UK and Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Every single document essentially in this archive bears a secrecy designation.
Most of them are top secret.
And yet one of the things that was so striking to me as I was going through this archive, is that most of the documents I was seeing, despite the fact that they were marked top secret, were completely banal.
Boring even.
There were instructions on how NSA employees should obtain parking credentials, or requesting vacation days, and that would be marked secret, which meant technically it was a crime to disclose it.
And that was true of the vast majority of the archive, and that's because in Washington, everything is reflexively a secret.
It's reflexively marked classified, and therefore it's illegal to describe what the government is doing.
So often, for that reason, when I hear, oh, so-and-so leaked classified information or was careless with classified materials, the reason I scoff at that Is because I know that most often classified documents are harmless.
They're empty.
They're just things that, it just means the government is talking about them or doing them.
That's all it means.
There's no discretion ever exercised about what should and shouldn't be secret.
Everything is made secret in Washington.
We just heard with the now-forgotten leak by that young leaker who was discovered on Discord, Jack Teixeira.
When that leak was first unveiled and there were reports that he had leaked classified or top secret information, we heard, oh, these are the most sensitive documents the government has.
This is the most damaging and destructive leak in American history.
As though the documents they always try and imply contain the names of undercover agents in the field.
CIA undercover agents are people who are working as informants to the U.S.
government.
And then when we saw the documents, We saw that all of that was untrue.
There was almost nothing in these documents that was barely above the level of what was publicly reported about the war in Ukraine.
There were a few documents showing where U.S.
troops were stationed.
Possibly that is legitimately classified, but it's not as though the world crumbles if that gets revealed because those documents were revealed.
And to this day, there's no harm demonstrated.
And that's true in almost every case.
When WikiLeaks first published its motherlode of top secret information, many national security officials came out under the Obama administration and claimed WikiLeaks had blood on its hands.
And yet later on when media outlets tried to investigate that claim, They discovered that there was actually no harm that could be demonstrated to any individual as a result of WikiLeaks' publications.
They hadn't uncovered the names of any agents in the field, they hadn't put in danger anyone, because they were actually very careful about how they were redacting those documents, and even the documents in unredacted form ended up being harmless, though informative.
And the same is true in the Snowden case.
They made all those claims about how blood would be on our hands because we were disclosing these documents.
And to this day, if you ask a single national security official to be specific about any harm that was caused as a result of the reporting we did, they are incapable of providing any explanation.
Same with the Pentagon Papers.
It's always the same claim.
Oh, this is an incredibly dangerous leak.
It puts people in harm's way.
Because the reality is the only people in danger and the only people these leaks harm are the people whose criminal acts or deceit are unveiled.
That's who gets harmed.
And almost never the public.
Now we've heard already in the indictment that some of these documents that President Trump is alleged to have taken involve things like nuclear strategy and a potential attack on Iran.
But there's absolutely no evidence, it's not even alleged, that any harm got created as a result of President Trump's mishandling of these materials, if he in fact did it, or his decision to share with certain people what the content of these documents was.
He was able to do that for four years had he wanted.
To the extent there's an implication that he was trying to help America's enemies or anything else, he had control of the entire classified system.
So I say all this to be very, very skeptical when you hear this hysteria about what it means to leak classified information, including top secret documents, because I've seen firsthand how deceitful those claims almost always are.
That's the first issue about classified information.
Second point that I want to make is, in these cases, Where people leave classified information, the motive is always the most important question.
There's a big difference between being careless with classified information, the way President Trump is accused of being, the way Hillary Clinton was accused of being, though never got charged, versus having some malicious motive, the way David Petraeus President Obama's former CIA director was accused of when he shared genuinely sensitive documents with his mistress in order to enable her to write a adoring biography of him.
Or when Leon Panetta shared top secret information about the operation that led to Osama Bin Laden's capture because he wanted filmmakers in Hollywood to be able to make a pre-election hagiography about President Obama and his capture of Osama Bin Laden called Zero Dark Thirty.
Obviously, if someone sells classified information to an enemy government or passes them to an enemy government, that's a malicious motive entirely.
And then you have the most noble motive, which is somebody inside the government who has access to classified information discovers that the government is lying or engaging in criminality and the disclosure of these documents would reveal it.
So what is President Trump's motive here, allegedly?
Was he trying to help enemy governments?
Was he trying to expose government secrets to put people in danger?
There's no allegation of that.
At best, this is a case of carelessness, of taking some documents that he should have left in the White House, but believing he had the right to take them because he was the president.
I think that is another key point, is that, and I covered this earlier, that's what makes this case so bizarre.
It's one thing to take lower-level national security officials and prosecute them for disclosing classified material without authorization because they have no legal right to declassify information.
The classification designations bear on them, bind them.
But when it comes to the person who's the president, if they have the power to declassify, at best it's a bureaucratic transgression.
To take documents without having first declassified them.
It's a bureaucratic oversight.
Which is at most what this was, just like the indictment in Manhattan alleges that President Trump and the Trump Organization improperly classified the payments to Stormy Daniels as payments to Michael Cohen.
It was a bookkeeping.
Misdemeanor that Alvin Bradd for political motives turned into a felony.
It's not unlike what this case is either, if you think about it.
They acknowledge that President Trump had the power to declassify this material had he wanted.
They allege that he failed to, that he forgot to, that he neglected to, but he could have.
And had he done so, there's no question this wouldn't be a crime.
Once material is declassified, it's no longer a crime to take it, to mishandle it, to show it to other people.
So if President Trump had the power to declassify this information, and the argument is he just failed to, at best, these seven felony counts amount to what is really nothing more than a bureaucratic oversight, which happens to be the same basis for the Manhattan indictment as well.
Now, one other point that I think is critical to note Is that the hypocrisy at the heart of this case and the reaction to it is so large that it could explode mountains.
Washington runs on leaks of classified information every single day, literally every single day.
People inside the government call up their favorite media employees, their favorite employees of corporate media, and they leak classified information to them.
And almost nobody is prosecuted for this, ever.
Even when the motive is purely political.
Throughout the Trump years, we had some of the most serious, some of the gravest leaks of classified information leaks imaginable to the Washington Post and the New York Times, seemingly every day, as part of Russiagate or other efforts to sabotage or undermine Donald Trump.
And to this day, nobody cares about finding those leakers.
Because in Washington, leaking classified information is what makes that city run.
It's what makes the political establishment run.
It's what makes the media establishment run.
Just to give you one example, most of you are probably familiar with the case of Michael Flynn, the incoming National Security Advisor for President Trump, who was prosecuted by the Mueller investigation for the crime of picking up the telephone and calling the Russian ambassador
In order to say, I'm about to become National Security Advisor, I think we should smooth over U.S.-Russian relations, which is exactly what you would want an incoming National Security Advisor to do, but because they were determined to criminalize Michael Flynn, they turned that into a felony.
And then the FBI, on its own, went to General Flynn Having learned through a telephone intercept that they talked to the ambassador, and they made a perjury trap for him.
They said, when you talked to the ambassador, the Russian ambassador, did you talk about sanctions?
And this was weeks later.
His memory was foggy.
He had no reason to cover it up.
It wouldn't have been a crime for him to talk to the Russian ambassador.
But they claim, and the notes are very ambiguous, that General Flynn said, I'm not sure I did or I don't think I did.
And that became the foundation for the criminal prosecution, a perjury or obstruction charge, which is what they do.
They turn process crimes into the way to criminalize the people that they don't want, Now, we did an entire show on the Michael Flynn prosecution here on Rumble an hour and a half before we launched this nightly show back when we were doing periodic ones.
And I wrote a accompanying article for it when I was still at the Intercept about the fraud of that prosecution.
For years under liberal jurisprudence, there was a belief Most vehemently expressed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other liberal justices in the Supreme Court that you should not be able to be turned into a criminal simply because you falsely deny behavior to the FBI, that you have the right to deny to the FBI things that you've done that could lead to a criminal prosecution, that that's a form of the right against self-incrimination.
And yet, that was the entire basis of the prosecution of Michael Flynn.
But the important thing about this prosecution Is that the only reason we learned that Michael Flynn called Ambassador Kislyak and talked about sanctions was because the NSA was spying on Ambassador Kislyak.
He was a target of NSA surveillance, which makes sense.
He's a high level official in a adverse foreign government.
That's what the NSA does.
And they happened to catch Ambassador Kislyak talking to an American citizen, Michael Flynn, even though they had no warrants.
Now, this spying, eavesdropping, is kind of eavesdropping, where the NSA spies on a foreign citizen and therefore claims they need no warrants, and then ends up eavesdropping on a call that an American citizen has with that foreign target.
That was the basis for the George Bush-Dick Cheney illegal eavesdropping scheme in 2002.
It used to be you needed a warrant.
If you found out that someone you were listening to ended up talking to an American citizen, because foundationally to American democracy and the American Constitution is the idea that the U.S.
government cannot spy on your calls unless it has a warrant, even if you're talking to a foreign adversary or foreign citizen.
But in 2007 and 8, the Congress, with the support of the Democratic Party, changed that law and retroactively legalized the Bush-Cheney spying program to make it legal For the NSA to spy on your calls without a warrant, as long as you're talking to a foreign citizen.
And that was how they eavesdropped on the call of Michael Flynn, even though they had no warrant to do so.
They claimed, oh, Michael Flynn wasn't really our target.
Our target was the Russian ambassador whom he called.
And the way we ended up learning about Michael Flynn's conversation with the ambassador is because somebody inside the US government leaked The transcript of the NSA intercept to the Washington Post's David Ignatius, who was the first in early 2017 to report that Michael Flynn had called the Russian ambassador and talked about sanctions.
And under the law, under the criminal law, that is the most serious kind of leaking of classified information.
Leaking the intercepts that the NSA has on the calls of foreign leaders and foreign officials because obviously if you leak those kind of transcripts it makes those individuals like Ambassador Kislyak aware that the NSA has successfully eavesdropped on them and it of course makes them change how they communicate.
And so this is one of the few areas leaking NSA intercepts Where it's a crime, a felony, not only to leak it from inside the government, but also to publish it.
It's one of the few types of leaks that makes it a crime for the journalist to publish it.
That's how serious they regard these leaks.
And yet, to this day, five years later, not only was the leaker never caught, the one who leaked the transcript of the NSA call to David Ignatius, no one talks about it, no one cares.
Because these kinds of leaks happen every day.
All the people you see on TV who are expressing outrage and indignation that President Trump would treat classified information carelessly or recklessly or whatever, every single day people inside the government call them and give them classified information.
Every day you turn on CNN or you open the New York Times or the Washington Post and there will be stories saying anonymous sources tell us X, Y, and Z happened where X, Y, and Z is classified.
These leaks are the stuff on which Washington runs.
Nobody ever is classified, is prosecuted, except low-level leakers.
People like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning or Daniel Osberg.
They go to prison for a long time for doing it, but senior officials in Washington are never prosecuted, essentially, for this.
And if they are prosecuted, they are never really treated like criminals.
They never go to prison.
And that's what makes this prosecution of President Trump for doing something that happens every day in Washington So suspicious.
Now, I've heard people saying, look, if you break the law, you should go to jail.
You should be prosecuted.
And the fact that other people break the law and aren't prosecuted makes no difference.
But that is not how the law works.
In every other instance, you can argue that whataboutism doesn't matter.
So you say, oh, Russia committed a war crime because they used this certain weapon here.
Cluster bombs or whatever.
And then someone comes along and says, well, the United States uses those weapons, and Ukraine uses those weapons, and the UK uses the weapon, and Israel uses those weapons.
And then the response is, oh, that's whataboutism.
Who cares if other people do it?
Two, if Russia does it, it's wrong.
And that's the kind of argument being marshaled here.
Who cares if everybody in Washington constantly leaks classified information?
The fact that President Trump did it means he should be prosecuted.
But that is not how the law works.
The law is an extremely potent weapon.
It can put you in a cage.
It can deprive you of your liberty.
It can seize your assets.
It can even, in some cases, take your life.
And so, in order for the law to be accepted in a society that the government has the power through force to come and take you and put you in a cage, it needs to have credibility as a law.
It needs to be something other than just a brute weapon.
That's used against political enemies.
And the only way to ensure that the law has credibility is if it's applied consistently and universally and not selectively.
That's why in law, precedent is everything.
How the law has been applied in other similar cases always guides how we view the law in this case.
And the fact that, as we're about to show you, so many people Who were on the side of the establishment, who were judged politically favorably by the establishment, who did exactly what President Trump is accused to have done, but far worse, the fact that they were given slaps on the wrist or never even prosecuted, of course sheds enormous light on the motives at play here and therefore on the validity of the prosecution.
Now the final point I want to make before going into these historical examples is one of the laws that has been invoked as the basis for these charges against President Trump is the Espionage Act of 1917.
And for those who didn't see it, we devoted last night's show, before we knew President Trump had been indicted under this law, in the context of the ongoing attempt to extradite Julian Assange to stand trial in the United States, we devoted the show to how this Espionage Act of 1917 is one of the most repressive and unjust laws in the U.S.
Code.
And I won't repeat that here now just because the context is President Trump, but I would encourage you, if you haven't already watched it, to go back and watch the show we did last night where we went into detail on the history of that law and the reasons why it gives the government obscene amounts of power that, as it turns out, they're using here.
Now, as I said, the two other counts are not about President Trump's taking classified information but are about his alleged obstruction of the investigation into this, and that's so often what happened in the Mueller investigation They would investigate somebody, they wouldn't find a crime, but they would turn the person into criminals during the investigation.
That's how they convicted Michael Flynn and got him to plead guilty, and Roger Stone, and so many others.
So my guess is President Trump looked at this prosecution with great hostility and that probably led him to be pretty hostile to the investigators and then now turned that into an obstruction charge.
We'll have to see what the evidence shows about whether he did that, but the focus, the bulk of the indictment, the reason why the investigation existed in the first place is the allegation that he mishandled classified information.
Now, let me just read a couple articles to you to detail the facts about the indictment.
We'll start with Lawfare that gives a pretty straightforward description of the indictment.
Quote, Trump indicted in Mar-a-Lago probe.
The article says a grand jury in South Florida has reportedly indicted former President Donald Trump in connection with the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation.
The indictment is under seal.
That was then, but it's not now.
But it apparently includes seven counts involving improper retention of classified material and conspiracy to obstruct the special counsel investigation.
In terms of substance, all we know about the indictment is that it is believed to consist of several charges, all relating to the classified documents investigation arising out of Mar-a-Lago.
Not the January 6th or any other matter within the special counsel purview.
They reported to include, quote, willful retention of national defense information, corruptly concealing documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and false statements.
And then they go on to say why they think it's justified, because this is lawfare, a deeply anti-Trump blog.
Now, again, they were saying this at the time before the indictment was released.
We've now read the indictment.
And the description we gave you of it is a more accurate one than the rest of that article.
Let's look at a few prior cases where these kinds of examples have been treated.
And let's start with the one I mentioned, which is the leak by President Obama's former CIA director, David Petraeus, of what were called the crown jewels of the U.S.
security state.
The most sensitive documents that the government has in its possession.
And he gave them to his mistress.
The woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair because she was writing a book on him and he wanted her to be able to write a book that was extremely adoring and gave her those documents for that reason.
Here we see from the Los Angeles Times when he pled guilty, quote, David H. Petraeus, the former CIA director and retired four-star army general, admitted Tuesday that he gave eight handwritten journals containing highly classified information about secret operations and identities of covert officers to his mistress in 2011 and lied about it to the FBI.
So there you have a case where the documents in this one instance were really the kind of documents they always warned about, containing the names of covert officers overseas and secret covert operations that were being undertaken.
And he gave it to her.
She had no ability to keep them secure.
And the idea was to let her write a book.
And then he lied about it to the FBI.
What happened?
Quote, Petraeus pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of retaining classified information.
Prosecutors agreed not to charge him with more serious crimes such as obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, the DOJ announced.
Petraeus agreed to pay a $40,000 fine and prosecutors said they would recommend that he receive probation instead of prison time.
Petraeus ran the CIA for only 14 months before he was forced to step down after admitting to an illicit affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.
The FBI had uncovered the affair while investigating allegedly threatening emails that Broadwell had sent to a Florida socialite who was friends with Petraeus and his wife.
Two weeks before the scandal broke, Petraeus was interviewed by two FBI agents who said they were investigating allegations of security breaches in that meeting, according to court documents released Tuesday.
Petraeus told the agents he had never given classified information to Broadwell.
But according to court papers, Petraeus had given her five-by-eight-inch-bound notebooks that contained notes from official and unofficial meetings and briefings while he was in Afghanistan.
The journals contained classified information regarding the identity of covert intelligence officers, war strategy, intelligence capability, diplomatic discussions, quotes from and deliberate discussions with high-level National Security Council meetings, and Petraeus' private meetings with President Obama, according to court documents.
Petraeus did not give the books to his official military historian, as required, but kept them in his home.
On August 4, 2011, a month before he was to take over the CIA, Broadwell asked, quote, by the way, where are your black books?
According to a recording she made interviewing him, the court paper said Petraeus told her they were, quote, in a rucksack somewhere, but that the contents were, quote, highly classified.
So he didn't spend a day in prison.
They ended up charging him with misdemeanor counts, one misdemeanor count.
He ended up getting a job at Harvard.
He became the global chairman of the KKR Global Investment Bank, made tens of millions of dollars, and is still treated now as one of the wise old men of Washington, even though his leak was infinitely more severe than almost any other leak, certainly by Edward Snowden, by Chelsea Manning, By almost anyone who has been sent to prison for years the way they want to do to President Trump.
Now, this is the selectivity, the selectivity, the political game-playing that they do with this law that makes its entire existence and application so inherently suspect.
Now, there's another case that many of you may have forgotten about.
It took place in the 1990s during the Clinton years.
Where the National Security Advisor to President Clinton, Sandy Berger, went to a room where very sensitive materials were kept and he stole them.
He stuffed them in his pants.
With the malicious intent to remove them and prevent investigators from discovering them.
Here from NBC News 2006, agency says ex-Clinton aide took classified documents.
Quote, President Clinton's National Security Advisor removed classified documents from the National Archives, hid them under a construction trailer, and later tried to find the trash collector to retrieve them, the agency's internal watchdog said Wednesday.
The report was issued more than a year after Sandy Berger pleaded guilty and received a criminal sentence for removing the documents.
Berger took the documents in the fall of 2003 while working to prepare himself and Clinton administration witnesses for testimony to the September 11th Commission.
Burger was authorized as the Clinton administration's representative to make sure the commission got the correct classified materials.
He pleaded guilty to unlawfully removing and retaining classified information.
He was fined $50,000.
Ordered to perform 100 hours of community service.
And was barred from access to classified material for three years.
Inspector General Paul Brachfeld reported that National Archives employees spotted Berger bending down and fiddling something white around his ankles.
The employees did not feel at the time there was enough information to confront someone of Berger's statue, the report said.
Later, when Berger was confronted by Archive officials about the missing documents, He lied by saying he did not take them, the report said.
Brackfield's report included an investigator's note taken during an interview with Berger.
The note dramatically described Berger's removal of documents from an October 2, 2003 visit to the archives.
Berger took a break to go outside with an escort while it was dark.
He had taken four documents in his pockets.
He headed toward a construction area.
Mr. Berger looked up and down the street, up into the windows of the archive and the G.O.
Day and did not see anyone, said notes prepared by the Inspector General's office.
He then slid the documents under a construction trailer, according to the Inspector General.
Berger acknowledged that he later retrieved the documents from the construction area and returned them to his office.
Quote, he was aware of the risk he was taking, the Inspector General notes said.
Berger then returned to the archive building.
Without fearing the documents would slip out of his pocket so the staff would notice that his pockets were bulging.
The note said Berger had not been aware that archive staff had been tracking the documents he was provided because of earlier suspicions from previous visits that he was removing materials.
Also, the employees had made copies of some documents.
By October 2003, the report said, an archives official called Berger to discuss missing documents from his visit two days earlier, and the investigator's note said, quote, Mr. Berger panicked because he realized he was caught.
The note said that Berger had, quote, destroyed, cut into small pieces, three or four of the documents.
These were put into the trash.
After the trash had been picked up, Berger, quote, tried to find the trash collector, but had no luck, the note said.
Another person who never went to prison, was not convicted of a felony, got a fine, and yet he was deliberately stealing documents to prevent them from being discovered as part of the 9-11 Commission, looking into how 9-11 happened.
Remember, 9-11 happened nine months after the end of the Clinton administration.
And here you had the National Security Advisor for Bill Clinton Repeatedly stuffing into his pants, stealing extremely sensitive documents from the National Archive to prevent investigators from discovering it.
We never really learned what those documents would have revealed or what his motive was, but obviously his motive was malicious.
He didn't go and get convicted of any felony.
He never spent a day in jail.
He was a good friend of the Clintons.
He got basically off scot-free.
Now, perhaps the most analogous case is Hillary Clinton.
Because unlike David Petraeus, unlike Sandy Berger, there's no allegation that Donald Trump maliciously stole these documents with any ill motive.
He didn't expose the names of covert agents.
At best, as I said before, it was a bureaucratic oversight.
And that was the claim ultimately made about Hillary Clinton, that she, when she set up a private server, an email server, at her home, in which she received their, passed through in that, classified information, even though it was unprotected, the claim from James Comey was, even though what she did was wrong and careless and reckless, she didn't have the requisite criminal intent necessary to prosecute her, and so they didn't.
Now you may recall that Hillary Clinton lied repeatedly about what happened here.
In fact, here's a PolitiFact rating from July of 2016 and you know PolitiFact would not be calling her a liar.
Just a few months before the election, unless there was extremely compelling reason to do so, she had denied, as you see there, that she had ever received or sent any material that was marked classified information on her private email server while Secretary of State.
That was an absolute lie.
There was classified material found passing through that private server, and therefore PolitiFact rates that as a lie.
So she absolutely lied.
But in July of 2016, FBI Director Jim Comey,
Who, let us remember, was just accused by a very well-regarded prosecutor, John Durham, in a 302-page report that he filed after a years-long investigation, that the FBI under James Comey in mid-2016 opened in a criminal investigation that became Russiagate into Trump and Russia collusion, even though there was nowhere near an evidentiary basis
That would have justified the opening of a criminal investigation by the FBI.
Comey did it because, as he now admits and as we now know, he hates President Trump and wanted him to lose that election.
One can certainly reasonably presume That was a similar motive for why he chose not to prosecute Hillary Clinton, even though she also had classified material at her home that was very, very carelessly kept on an unprotected private email server that she had.
Here from the New York Times, you see the headline, FBI Director James Comey recommends no charges for Hillary Clinton on email.
Quote, the FBI Director James B. Comey on Thursday recommended no criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for handling classified information while she was Secretary of State, lifting an enormous legal cloud from her presidential campaign less than two hours before she boarded Air Force One for her first joint campaign appearance with President Obama.
What a gift!
What a stroke of luck!
On a day of high political drama in Washington, Mr. Comey rebuked Mrs. Clinton as being, quote, extremely careless in using a private email address and server.
He raised questions about her judgment, contradicted statements she had made about her email practices, said it was possible that hostile foreign governments had gained access to her account, and declared that a person still employed by the government, Mrs. Clinton left the State Department in 2013, could have faced disciplinary action for doing what she did.
To warn a criminal charge, Mr. Comey said, there had to be evidence that Mrs. Clinton intentionally transmitted or willfully mishandled classified information.
The FBI found neither, and as a result, he said, quote, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor could bring such a case.
Earlier today, Hillary mocked this investigation.
She promoted a hat that said, butthurt emails, which is a phrase used by liberal pundits to blame the media for Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016, saying that they excessively focused on this investigation, that it was no big deal, that saying that they excessively focused on this investigation, that it was no big deal, that she mishandled classified information, precisely because everybody knows that mishandling It's what people do in Washington every day.
And not only do liberal pundits think she should be prosecuted for it, they were enraged that some media outlets, including the New York Times, even reported on it, made it seem like it was a big deal.
To the point where, but her emails became an inside joke among liberal journalists, excuse the redundancy, because that was their way of saying, oh, Trump is this evil fascist and white supremacist.
But her emails.
In other words, the media was too even-handed in their coverage of the election by not only focusing on Trump's alleged wrongdoing with Russia, which turned out to be baseless, but on Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified documents as well, because everyone views mishandling classified documents in Washington by powerful people as a joke.
The only people who go to prison for that are low-level people who act with noble motives, like Edward Snowden, or Julian Assange, or Chelsea Manning.
Powerful people who leak all the time get slaps on the wrist, like David Petraeus, and Sandy Berger, and Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
Let us remember that Joe Biden has a very similar case, where he was found to have kept classified documents in all kinds of places.
Well, the law prohibits him from keeping these documents.
Here from Business Insider in January of this year, quote, Biden suggests the classified documents found in his garage were safe because it was locked with his Corvette in there.
That was his defense.
Oh, I keep my Corvette where I kept the classified documents.
Obviously, I wouldn't keep my Corvette in an unsafe place.
Quote, President Joe Biden confirmed Thursday that a second batch of classified documents was found in his garage, but suggested they were safe because the garage which stored his Corvette was locked.
Do you think Mar-a-Lago was locked?
At a White House press conference, Biden downplayed security concerns about the materials found at his house in Delaware.
When a Fox News reporter asked what Biden was thinking by keeping documents in his garage next to his Corvette, Biden pushed back, quote, By the way, my Corvette's in a locked garage, okay, so it's not like they're sitting out on the street, he said.
So the material was in a locked garage?
Asked Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, Biden responded, quote, yes, as well as my Corvette.
It kept it in his garage.
On Thursday, U.S.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to probe the matter, and the White House said it would cooperate with the investigation.
The latest cache of classified documents being unearthed comes after a first batch of classified documents were discovered last fall at Biden's former private office at the Penn-Biden Center in Washington.
CNN reported the documents covered topics that included Ukraine, Iran, and the UK.
It is currently unclear how many documents are in the batch and what they were about.
Now, the distinction people make is that Biden returned the documents as soon as he was made aware that he had them, whereas Trump resisted returning them for several months, even when the Archive and the Justice Department was asking for them back.
But nobody thinks at this point that Joe Biden is going to be prosecuted, just like Hillary Clinton wasn't, for keeping classified information in exactly the way the law prohibits, in his garage, strewn about, or in his private office.
So what we're going to have is the Biden Justice Department prosecuting Donald Trump for mishandling classified information.
After the Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute Hillary Clinton in the middle of an election for doing the same, and almost certainly the Biden Justice Department will protect Joe Biden and refuse to prosecute him as well, claiming he lacked the necessary intent.
Now, there definitely are liberals who are desperate to put President Trump in prison.
I don't think either of these charges, the one in Manhattan or the one just brought today, will do that because I think the real goal of kind of the establishment writ large is not to put President Trump in prison.
They would love to see that.
But the real goal is to prevent him from running in 2024, including by telling him, look, we have the power to convict you.
You have a Manhattan jury.
You definitely took these documents.
We have you on tape saying that you were aware the documents were still classified when you were talking to the people to whom you were showing them, which technically is a law.
A jury will find that.
We can put you in prison unless you agree that you won't run for president in 2024.
And if you agree you won't run for president in 2024, we'll give you the same kind of slap on the wrist that we gave to David Petraeus and Sandy Berger And Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden who weren't prosecuted at all.
Now, in case you think that's my supposition, the most popular and influential liberal TV personality last night went on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow.
She was with Lawrence O'Donnell.
And inadvertently, she admitted that that really is the game here.
That's the goal that she thinks should be pursued.
Listen to what she said.
You have to wonder if the Justice Department is considering whether there is some political solution to this criminal problem, whether part of the issue here is not just that Trump has committed crimes, but that Trump has committed crimes and plans on being back in the White House.
Do they consider, as part of a potential plea offer, something that would prescribe him, proscribe him from running for office again?
I don't know.
I would imagine if anything like that happened, that it would have to come from the defense side of the negotiation, that the Trump team would say, oh, by the way, and with this, we will also, you know, drop out of the race for president.
Otherwise, it would put the Justice Department in this position.
Look at her face there when she realizes what she just did.
He claims they're trying to stop him, simply trying to stop him from becoming president again.
And that's the only reason they're doing this.
So my guess, given those dynamics and the change, I think, in the way the Justice Department sees this.
Look at her face there when she realizes what she just did.
She said what we should do here is tell President Trump that you can get out of these charges as long as you agree not to run for president again in 2024.
for.
And then Lawrence O'Donnell said yeah, except the problem with that is that would prove President Trump was right all along because that's his claim.
His claim is that the only reason these charges are being brought against him Is his leverage to force him out of the race.
In other words, he's claiming that the real motive is the one that you, Rachel Maddow, just said you wanted to see happen and you wanted to see these charges leveraged into forcing him to drop out of the race.
And watch what she did when she realized that she was vindicating Trump's claims about why these charges are being brought.
The only reason they're doing this.
So my guess, given those dynamics and the change, I think, in the way the Justice Department sees this in those 50 years since Spiro Agnew, it just seems unlikely that they would reach into the political zone of the solution.
Our politics does have to find a solution to this, but it might have to find that solution separate and apart from the criminal process.
Because these charges are purely political, and that's incredibly clear and indisputable if you just take a little bit of a step back and look at how these things are normally treated.
Now, let me just end here by noting a kind of irony.
Last week, we did a 10-year anniversary on the start of the Snowden reporting.
Actually, it was on Monday.
The first report that we published was June 6, 2013, so 10 years ago on Monday.
Today happens to be the four year anniversary of the start of the reporting I did in Brazil that ended up freeing Lula da Silva.
And the bulk of that investigative expose, which the Brazilian government ended up trying to prosecute me for and imprisoning me for unsuccessfully, was that the charges that were brought against Lula that ended up convicting him and rendering him ineligible to run in 2018 at a time when he was leading all polls, just like President Trump is now leading all polls, Was the byproduct itself of corruption.
In other words, they saw that Lula was leading in the polls.
The Brazilian elite were petrified that he was going to win again.
They thought they had finally gotten rid of PT, his party.
Lula's party won four consecutive national elections.
2002, 2006, Lula won.
And then his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, won in 2010.
And then his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, won in 2010 and then 2014.
They couldn't beat the Workers' Party at the polls in Brazil.
They impeached Dilma in 2016, but Lula was nonetheless leading the polls in 2017.
All polls.
This is when Bolsonaro was kind of an afterthought.
Here you see from Folha de São Paulo, the largest newspaper in Brazil, in 2017.
The election was coming in 2018.
There you see the headline, Data Folha Poll.
Shows ex-president Lula leading in 2018, and it goes on to say voter preferences showed him having a rather large lead with 30% of the vote, followed by Marina Silva and Jair Bolsonaro.
And then another similar article in mid-2017 shows that he leads in 2018 but would likely only win in a second round.
What happened was, in 2017, when he was leading the polls, he was charged with corruption charges that were always dubious.
Regardless of your criticisms of Lula, it was clear these charges were dubious as a way of preventing him from running.
In 2017, at the height of his polling lead, he was convicted of corruption charges and sentenced to 10 years in prison and made ineligible to run.
There you see the Guardian article in mid-2017.
In early 2018, he was declared ineligible to run and he wasn't able to run.
Four years ago today, after a source provided me with a huge archive of hacked telephone logs between the key prosecutor in the case and the judge in that case, we were able to publish the first of a series of reports.
Here you see June 9, 2019, the first article where we say, here's why we're reporting on this, why we're publishing these materials.
And three months later, Lula was released from prison.
And then he was made eligible to run, he ran in 2022, and he won.
A very contested election against Jair Bolsonaro, but that is what ended up happening.
And I say this because the left, both in Brazil and internationally, loved this reporting.
I was widely praised by the international left, by the Brazilian left, for the reporting that we did, because the left understood that that's what establishments do.
They didn't want Bolsonaro, the establishment in Brazil, at all.
They thought they were finally going to get the center-right, kind of Mitch McConnell-type president, the party that they've long supported, called PSDB.
And instead, they got a Frankenstein.
As a result of doing this was Jair Bolsonaro, who they hated even more than Lula.
But at the time, they thought all they had to do was make Lula ineligible, do a criminal charge, remove him from the race, and get the outcome they wanted.
So the left understood perfectly well that that's how establishments function.
They use and abuse their power, including the legal power and their control over the justice system, to take candidates and leaders who they are afraid of winning and render them ineligible through abuse of the law.
That was the entire purpose of that reporting that we did in 2019 and 2020.
And the left had no trouble understanding it at all.
And that is, to me, clearly what's happening in this case as well.
These are two incredibly trivial charges, despite the fact that they're felonies.
The one in Manhattan, the one here.
And the fact that it's coming at a time when President Trump leads all polls, a wide lead over Republican challengers, and a lead over Joe Biden, with all the weaknesses Joe Biden has, and running this time as the defender of the status quo, four years later, of course they're petrified of Trump winning.
And just like Rachel Maddow said, what they're hoping to do is to leverage these cases to force Trump out of the race.
So if you don't see the drastically politicized motive at play here and in the selective treatment of this law and the treatment of other cases, it's only because you don't want to.
And it's not the case that politicized prosecutions are acceptable on the grounds that, well, Trump probably broke the law, and that's all that matters.
That's not all that matters when it comes to the law.
The law only has credibility if it's something more than a brute political weapon where the government can just put into prison in cages people they disagree with and allow those they agree with and those they like to walk free when they violate the law.
And that is exactly what is happening here.
And I think we're going to have a huge amount of problems on our hands.
If the country watches the Biden Justice Department try and put Donald Trump into prison for things that Hillary Clinton did and that Joe Biden did, and then watch them, neither of them, be charged, there's already a huge lack of trust and faith in leading American institutions, including the DOJ and the justice system.
And this will make it so much worse, and rightfully so.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
It's Friday night, so we will be back on Monday night where we will have for you a full one hour interview with Joe Biden's leading primary challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who we sat down and filmed an interview today on a wide range of issues from Ukraine and big tech censorship to COVID and vaccines and whistleblowers and so much more.
