Ben Shapiro:

President Trump has apparently now been indicted on seven criminal charges in the classified documents case. You’ll recall that this case actually began after it turned out that President Trump had a bunch of documents at Mar-a-Lago and those documents were requested by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The National Archives warned Trump they could escalate the issue to prosecutors or Congress if he continued to refuse to hand over the documents. He had also been warned by former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann that he could face serious legal jeopardy if he did not comply.

After about 15 of those boxes were returned, officials discovered there were hundreds of pages of classified material in the boxes. Federal law enforcement was notified of the discovery, and they came to believe there were more materials that had not been returned, and then the DOJ issued a subpoena seeking additional classified documents.

A few weeks later, the DOJ decided to raid Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s legal team had signed a written statement claiming that all the classified material had been returned. The FBI executed a search warrant on the property and recovered more classified material.

Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump are among the public officials who we know have had classified material in a place they weren’t supposed to. The only one of those four people who had the power to summarily declassify such material was President Trump.

The president can summarily declassify anything. He’s the head of the executive branch. None of the others were able to declassify anything. So that’s number one. Number two: Why exactly was Trump holding these classified materials in the first place?

As it turns out, according to pretty much everybody who has testified in this case, apparently Donald Trump just decided to hold onto the documents simply because he wanted to hold onto the documents. There was no nefarious reason. The likely thing that happened is, he left the White House and thought, Hey, look, it’s a letter. Kim Jong Un signed it. I’m going to bring it.

And he brought it. And that was the end of the story. The National Archives said, “Can we have the letter?” Trump said, “No.”

That’s pretty much the extent of it. Is that a national security threat to the extent that the former president of the United States and the current Republican front runner for the nomination should be indicted on criminal charges?

No. The answer is, no. And the reason the answer is no is because we have the disparate treatment of those other public officials, including most egregiously, Hillary Clinton.

Let’s look at what Hillary Clinton actually did, because it’s relevant in this context. The FBI and DOJ decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her activities surrounding taking home classified documents and loading them onto an unclassified server, a secret private server kept in a bathroom.

She wound up using BleachBit to clean the documents when it became clear she was suspected of holding those documents, and then those classified documents ended up on the very-not-classified computer of a pervert named Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin’s husband. Huma was Hillary’s close aide.

Hillary still did not get prosecuted. It’s hard to think of a looser use of classified material. It’s difficult to think of Donald Trump doing anything that is remotely as sloppy as that.

Trump’s prosecutors are going out of their way to say Donald Trump was willfully and maliciously hiding this material. The reason they are doing this is because if they say he accidentally mishandled classified information, then we are all going to ask the obvious questions: Why isn’t Joe Biden being prosecuted? Why wasn’t Mike Pence prosecuted? Why isn’t Hillary Clinton prosecuted?

This is differential prosecution. Everyone can see this is differential prosecution. Hillary Clinton stored thousands of documents on a private server in her home while she was secretary of state. Many of those documents were classified. Those documents were then bleached.

The Wall Street Journal:

Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, his indictment by President Biden’s Justice Department is a fraught moment for American democracy. For the first time in U.S. history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former President who is also running against the sitting President. This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come.

Special counsel Jack Smith announced the indictment in a brief statement on Friday. But no one should be fooled: This is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s responsibility. Mr. Garland appointed Mr. Smith to provide political cover, but Mr. Garland, who reports to Mr. Biden, has the authority to overrule a special counsel’s recommendation. Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.

***

The indictment levels 37 charges against Mr. Trump that are related to his handling of classified documents, including at his Mar-a-Lago club, since he left the White House. Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the ancient and seldom-enforced Espionage Act for the “willful retention of national defense information.”

But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.

This doesn’t fit the spirit or letter of the PRA, which was written by Congress to recognize that such documents had previously been the property of former Presidents. If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense.

The other counts are related to failing to turn over the documents or obstructing the attempts by the Justice Department and FBI to obtain them. One allegation is that during a meeting with a writer and three others, none of whom held security clearances, Mr. Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack’” from the Defense Department. “As president I could have declassified it,” he said on audio tape. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

The feds also say Mr. Trump tried to cover up his classified stash by “suggesting that his attorney hide or destroy documents,” as well as by telling an aide to move boxes to conceal them from his lawyer and the FBI.

As usual, Mr. Trump is his own worst enemy. “This would have gone nowhere,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS recently, “had the President just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”

***

That being said, if prosecutors think that this will absolve them of the political implications of their decision to charge Mr. Trump, they fail to understand what they’ve unleashed.

In the court of public opinion, the first question will be about two standards of justice. Mr. Biden had old classified files stored in his Delaware garage next to his sports car. When that news came out, he didn’t sound too apologetic. “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” Mr. Biden said. AG Garland appointed another special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate, but Justice isn’t going to indict Mr. Biden.

As for willful, how about the basement email server that Hillary Clinton used as Secretary of State? FBI director James Comey said in 2016 that she and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” According to him, 113 emails included information that was classified when it was sent or received. Eight were Top Secret. About 2,000 others were later “upclassified” to Confidential. This was the statement Mr. Comey ended by declaring Mrs. Clinton free and clear, since “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

This is the inescapable political context of this week’s indictment. The special counsel could have finished his investigation with a report detailing the extent of Mr. Trump’s recklessness and explained what secrets it could have exposed. Instead the Justice Department has taken a perilous path.

The charges are a destructive intervention into the 2024 election, and the potential trial will hang over the race. They also make it more likely that the election will be a referendum on Mr. Trump, rather than on Mr. Biden’s economy and agenda or a GOP alternative. This may be exactly what Democrats intend with their charges.

Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump. But the indictment might make GOP voters less inclined to provide a democratic verdict on his fitness for a second term. Although the political impact is uncertain, Republicans who are tired of Mr. Trump might rally to his side because they see the prosecution as another unfair Democratic plot to derail him.

***

And what about the precedent? If Republicans win next year’s election, and especially if Mr. Trump does, his supporters will demand that the Biden family be next. Even if Mr. Biden is re-elected, political memories are long.

It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken. It didn’t need to be. However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia. The FBI recovered the missing documents when it raided Mar-a-Lago, so presumably there are no more secret attack plans for Mr. Trump to show off.

The greatest irony of the age of Trump is that for all his violating of democratic norms, his frenzied opponents have done and are doing their own considerable damage to democracy.