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A) the disparate treatment is all feels. Here's a list of government misconduct, and I'm seeing lots of Ds. And I haven't personally witnessed Democrats attempt to protect other Democrats accused to crime.
B) The government is not all Democrats. Republicans had effective control of the federal government from 2016-2020. They also have the power to go after Democrats. You might say, "Well, Republicans are nicer and wouldn't do that!" I don't buy that. Trump literally campaigned on going after Hillary. If he didn't do that that sounds like he squandered a prime opportunity and you should judge him and other Republicans for that accordingly.
C) "The legal system pays disproportionate attention to criminals as opposed to non-criminals" also explains the phenomenon you are seeing, and is literally how the justice system is supposed to work. Doubly true if the criminals leave obvious evidence.
D) The "obvious" part of your "obvious legal mistakes" is evidence against it being a political gesture. If you make an argument that turns out to be false, it hurts your credibility, both legally and publicly. Therefore, it makes sense to at least be clever in telling lies, especially since the legal system is designed to be adversarial and thus sniff out falsehoods.
E) Let's say you are given the task to scan thousands of pages of documents, and put them back exactly as they were. How do you do that? If it were me, I would have some sort of separator to remind me where everything was. Like a cover sheet. And since the contents are believed to be confidential, I would put "confidential" on those separators. Then due to some mistake or miscommunication between multiple people, they either don't get removed at the end or aren't disclosed when meant to be disclosed.
It isn’t about being disclosed. Those separators immediately ended up on the front page of the NYT. And the correction did not. So no, no price was paid for the mistake. And they knew no price would be paid.
Corrections never end up on the front page of anything. The government does not control the NYT.
The idea - that the Justice Department spends probably millions of dollars arranging a raid of Mar-a-Lago and building a case that they know they will lose just so that they can add a cover sheet saying "confidential," which will end up on the front page of NYT for a day before being debunked (which they also know won't matter) - is actually extremely conspiratorial. I would argue if they're smart enough to do this and also set Trump up to be recorded showing documents to a civilian and say that those documents are confidential (This part seems to be getting ignored a lot) then they could have planted better evidence than cover sheets.
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