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I think charging a candidate for public office (excepting very very serious crimes) is one of those holy shit don’t do that things for me that I think the should be a very high bar for doing that. It shouldn’t be just missing documents, but they’d better be very important documents and he better be trying to sell them or something equally bad. The reason I say this is that the graveyard of Republican governments is full of the bones of countries that started doing exactly this. In fact, prosecuting and law faring the opposition is very nearly a hallmark of a failed democracy.
I think he very well could have had classified information. I just think that if those aren’t very important secrets to keep, that this isn’t really the reason to go after him. And one thing I’d point out as evidence that these aren’t important secrets is that the government waited nearly a year to bother searching for them. If these were nuclear secrets, military readiness documents, invasion plans for our enemy states, lists of agents or anything of that sort the idea of waiting nearly a year and alerting Trump that he had something that valuable (which he could sell or give out) seems ludicrously incompetent. If the CIA believes I have the GPS coordinates of a nuclear silo, it’s only a matter of hours before I’m detained and my house ransacked and every electronic device I own confiscated. They aren’t going to ask my lawyers nicely no matter who I am.
The other explanation for why they took so long to get the documents back is precisely because they wanted to proceed as gingerly as possible. They escalated only after the year-long tactic of "please please please give back the documents" didn't work.
I assumed the issue away for purpose of this post, but I would love to see someone try and defend Trump's obstructionary maneuvering here.
But it still doesn’t seem to make sense as a logical whole. If the documents are such that revealing them to outsiders is a national security matter, then no matter who holds them, it’s absolutely essential that they get them back as quickly as possible. If the documents were such that the government was absolutely okay with almost a whole year of not knowing whether they were being exposed to the wrong sorts of people (also NB: they knew the Russians were gearing up for an invasion, and suspected Trump had some ties to the Kremlin), these things could not have been the kinds of secrets that the government and democrats want the public to think they are. If some secrets get out — technical specs for weapons, a report on nuclear weapons, secret agents, military readiness and training — it could well be an existential threat. Even if the government wants to proceed “gently”, it would still be quite unwilling to leave them unsecured just to run everything by lawyers and through lawyers.
What seems to exist here is a form of Motte and Bailey. When the opponents of Trump want this to be a big deal they try to imply that these documents were very important state secrets. When they’re trying to get them, they’re acting like they don’t think they’re important enough to be worried about, and are perfectly content to disclose to Trump through lawyers that these are super important documents and “pretty please with sugar and a cherry on top can we get them back,” with no date attached.
I'm not seeing what's illogical. If they moved too quickly or too aggressively, that would've garnered understandable outrage. But it's also true that they severely undercut their claims of emergency by taking so long. Given those constraints there was no obvious right and wrong decision, they were going to face flak no matter what.
I mean yes they’d garner outrage, but if these documents were indeed of national security importance, it seems like they’d be much better to take the blowback and keep national security from the risk that while you’re quietly asking pretty please give us the secrets (which is in itself reckless as if he didn’t understand the importance of the documents, you just told him) giving him ample time to hide, destroy, copy, or sell these things before they can be taken and secured.
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There's also a big range of actions that can be taken between 'ask nicely' and prosecution. A good middle ground could be do the raid and then not take things further after retrieval.
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