Not quite. More like you are responsible to protect classified documents for the federal government. You put them in a box when you leave your job and take them home, where you store them, completely unprotected, in your garage next to your car for 6 years. Then somebody finds them and all of a sudden you realize it looks bad because you were so gleeful about Orange Man Bad so you get your lawyer to send them back to the government, where they should have been the whole time. You protest that you weren't negligent because you gave them back without a fuss, didn't you? Does it negate negligence if you just give them back after you get caught with them?
Or, you steal your neighbor's underwear off her wash line, but when she catches you doing it, you give them back. No problem, right? Everybody should just leave you alone, because you gave them back.
A lawyer I am fond of watching compared the Hillary case and the Trump case.
A better and more reasonable analogy would be the inadvertent explanation.
In the harried days of the end of an administration the people are rushing to box up lots of documents. Literally tens of thousands. Mistakes will be made. If you are 99.99% perfect you are still going to have a dozen or so mistakes when dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of documents. We can call this human. Because none of us is perfect.
Explaining away the mistake is a lot easier when the mistake is discovered and you tell someone.
For example. Pence and Biden. They both wondered if they had made similar mistakes, recognizing that it is human to do so and very easy to make that mistake. A folder mixed in with non classified inane and routine stuff. They both sent people to search for the possible mistake. When the mistake was discovered they reported it.
Better yet. Let’s use real world stuff. You go to the bank and deposit a check for $1,000. The bank teller screws up and credits you with $10,000. An extra zero was tapped. Now. If you withdraw that money in an effort to keep it deciding the bank screwed up and screw them. You have just committed a crime. In Georgia it’s called Theft by Taking.
But if you call the bank or go back and show them the error. You aren’t in any trouble. Because the money is corrected.
It is the difference between an honest reaction and a desire to profit or deceive.
But they did it too and you can’t bust me unless you bust everyone is cried every day by every moron who gets tagged for speeding. Everyone was driving the same why am I pulled over. It is an idiotic defense. You are admitting that you were speeding. And you knowingly exceeded the speed limit. You knew you were doing the wrong thing. And it’s not fair that you got pulled over and everyone else didn’t.
When you find you have made a mistake the first step to making everyone believe it was a mistake is to tell someone.
If Trump had told the Secret Service they had a problem, these documents shouldn’t be here. Then it would have gone down like it did with Biden and Pence. We made a mistake and it was inadvertent without the intent to take something. The FBI would have collected the files, thanked Trump for his honesty and integrity, and then closed the books.
The video I posted above checked the claims regarding Hillary. The lawyer could not find where anyone had ever been prosecuted for doing what Hillary had done. But we have a lot of examples of people taking unauthorized documents and keeping them. And we have a lot of people in prison for obstruction of Justice, lying to federal agents, and the rest.
A few thousand examples of that sort of stupidity exist. People who covered up the screw up and made it much worse.
Where I work the rules are pretty simple. If you have an accident you’re gonna get a slap on the wrist. If you don’t report it or lie about it, you are fired.
But that is society as a whole isn’t it? We get angry at a screw up. But we get really furious if we are lied to about the screw up. It wasn’t a blowjob that led to the impeachment of Clinton. It was lying about it later.