I don't recall Hillary claiming she had declassified the documents.
In the case of State Department information, she didn't have to - she "owned" it as the OCA, and was free to do with it as she pleased, including implicitly declassifying it by putting it into an unclass email. That's why the early numbers of her classified emails - which were very high - got winnowed
way down; most of it was State Department information, and so she had the legal authority to put it there, even if doing so wasn't wise. She didn't have the authority to put NGA, NSA, CIA, DOD, or other department's information on there, however, and that's where she ran into problems.
Though I will grant you that if this is going to sink Donnie's political future any hope that Hillary has goes down the tubes with it. Good riddance to both of them.
Hillary is already out of it, and isn't going to "go down the tubes", as the FBI already decided not to prosecute her for breaking the law.
The end of the entire Hillary email mess was a conclusion that she and her staff were wildly careless in their handling of classified information
Grossly Negligent, I think, would be the best description - though the FBI decided to invent a new standard of "extremely careless" whole cloth.
Given that each tranche of material identified as "Miscellaneous Secret or Top Secret or beyond top secret or confidential documents likely represents tens of if not hundreds of documents per category, Trump has much more classified stuff in his basement than Clinton ever thought of having on her server before during or after her term as Secretary of State.
We don't know exactly how many documents there were, of what type. However, we also don't know that any of them were actually classified, regardless of how they were marked. Just as HIllary's emails that were State Department material were downgraded by her use of it, Trump could have decided to use and store Top Secret information in an unsecure space, and made it unclassified if he so wished.
three things that make Hillary's mess a false equivalency to the Trump documents mess
It's not an exact equivalency, agreed. For example, from what we currently know, Hillary definitely broke the law, and Trump
may have broken the law, and, unfortunately, the person we would need to tell us whether or not he did... is Trump; who is, shall we say, not exactly a reliable witness.
- Trump claims to have declassified the material. There is so far no evidence that he did.
There need be none. It was entirely his decision to make, as he chose to make it.
The entries on the receipt do not identify the documents taken by FBI as declassified.
Which does not ultimately tell us one way or the other.
Hillary never claimed to declassify the material. Could Trump have declassified some of them and not told anybody....YUP. Donald is capable of literally anything that he thinks results in some advantage to him personally
Yup. That's sort of the problem. He could have decided "Yeah, all this is fine", and
that decision is all that would have been needed.
- Trump had a legal subpoena earlier this year after he sent back the 15 cartons and material and he resisted it. Hillary did not resist subpoenas.
Hillary resisted turning over material for months,
had her server wiped rather than obey direction to turn it over, and had an aid
physically destroy her other devices in an attempt to destroy the data rather than turn it over.
At the end of the day the difference is the difference between the totally unscrupulous, self-absorbed, narcissistic and vapid man, Donald Trump and Hillary's hubris which was always her political undoing and the usual coverup being worse than the crime. Hillary was far less dangerous to this country's National Security than Donald was by a country mile. They are both dead to me politically.
I don't think in this case I would say the coverup was worse than the crime, but, agreed that Trump is more dangerous to the nation, now.