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Given the ferocity of the Republican Party’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s email protocols six years ago, it stands to reason that leading GOP voices must be absolutely furious with Donald Trump, right? After all, Republicans left little doubt that they care passionately about how officials handle sensitive materials — and the degree to which politicians disqualify themselves from high office when they put documents at risk.
Indeed, this week’s revelations about Trump tearing up White House records and hauling 15 boxes of materials that didn’t belong to him have been brutal. Common sense suggests the Republicans who condemned Clinton in 2016 would be compelled by decency to be equally fierce in denouncing Trump.
I’m kidding, of course. As The New York Times noted overnight, Republicans, “once so forceful about the issue of mishandling documents,” are suddenly reticent about the defining issue of the 2016 race for the nation’s highest office.
Several Republicans who once railed against Mrs. Clinton’s document retention practices did not respond Thursday to questions about Mr. Trump’s actions. Others who had been directly involved with investigating Mrs. Clinton declined to discuss the specifics except to suggest, without evidence, that the National Archives and Records Administration was treating Mr. Trump more harshly.
This did not escape the attention of the former secretary of state.
There are apparently still some GOP efforts underway to suggest there’s a qualitative difference between the two controversies. Former Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who led the House Oversight Committee when it went after Clinton, told the Times yesterday that the situations aren’t identical because Clinton set up a “convenient arrangement” with a private server, in violation of State Department policy.
That’s true. But what Chaffetz neglected to mention is that Trump’s approach — tearing up official documents, allegedly trying to flush papers down toilets, hauling 15 boxes of records that didn’t belong to him, including highly classified materials, to his golf resort in Florida — is vastly worse than setting up a “convenient arrangement.”
As we’ve discussed, Republicans, with varying degrees of hysterics, made Clinton out to be a literal criminal who put the United States at risk. During the presidential campaign, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan went so far as to formally request that Clinton be denied intelligence briefings — insisting that her email practices were proof that she mishandled classified information and therefore couldn’t be trusted. To this day, rabid Republican activists will reflexively chant, “Lock her up!” at the mere mention of her name because she allegedly failed to properly deal with classified materials.
And now many of those same Republicans say they don’t much care.
Some might suggest that GOP voices have flip-flopped, conveniently changing their minds. But that gives the Republicans playing this game far too much credit: The problem is not that the GOP took the issue of document retention seriously before, only to later shift their position; the problem is that the GOP only pretended to care about the issue in the first place.