 Let's look at some details of the indictment here, pulling it up right now. The first 31 counts, counts one through 31, are willful retention of national defense information. So that's actually holding on to the documents. The remaining charges are basically some form of obstruction or lying to investigators. He had six top secret documents, which is the highest level of classification than in the storage room. He had 11 top secret, 36 secret, 28 confidential documents according to the indictment. Just some examples I have highlighted of the types of documents in intelligence briefing related to military activities and planning of foreign countries. Another one concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country. And then these are some pictures that have floated around the internet of how these documents were being stored on a kind of stage in Mar-a-Lago. There's a bunch crammed into a bathroom. And then there's a bunch of newspapers, clippings mixed in with redacted documents on the floor. This picture to me is that it shows the degree to which it was like a bunch of his personal stuff just mixed together with classified documents kind of opening the door for then the FBI to come in and sift through all of his stuff to look for classified documents. You know, you get me one hoarder on that jury and Trump is gonna walk. What do these pictures and this evidence say to you, Clark, about the kind of strength of the case against Trump? Well, it's horrifying. It's horrifying. So two things are true. We do have a problem with over-classification. No serious person disputes that, but that doesn't mean that every document that has been classified was improperly classified. Plenty of documents that the US government produces, the disclosure of which would result in the loss of human lives. It would result in people being killed who are working for our intelligence agencies in hostile countries and simply wave your hands at this and say, well, everybody does it and therefore Trump should get a free pass, I think is untenable. What everyone brings up as an analogy is Hillary Clinton. Is what Hillary Clinton did the same or worse or not as bad as what Trump did? Let's take a quick look back at what Comey had to say at that famous press conference where he dropped the charges and then dig into that question a little bit more deeply. Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless. Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Should she have been handed a free pass or should Trump, because she was kind of handed a free pass, also be handed a free pass? Well, let's be clear, what Hillary did was jaw-droppingly irresponsible and criminal. If you are the Secretary of State and you are housing emails on an unsecured Betty Crocker Easy Bake server at your home, which she was, you might as well set up every email that comes into that server to forward to Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un because they're gonna be reading them. And so the level of irresponsibility and cynicism on her part and criminality is difficult to express. Everything you just saw from Comey there is sort of a retcon or a retroactive attempt to rationalize the preordained conclusion that Hillary Clinton would be let off the hook. And that was preordained. She went about obstructing justice in a way that's sort of more in keeping with DC norms. Again, hiring the right law firm, having your lawyers do some of the dirty work instead of you. Trump just went right to the source and said, okay, well, let's just, grand jury wants these documents. I don't wanna give it to them. Let's have a conspiracy to make sure that they don't get them. I don't feel like I'm in a position to really have an intelligent opinion about whether Donald Trump's behavior was or wasn't worse than Hillary Clinton's. I will say this, he was stupider. Hillary knew that she was in the circle of trust, so to speak, in that circle of special treatment and that she could get away with it. Donald Trump should have known absolutely that whether it's fair or unfair, he was no longer in the circle of trust and he no longer had the kind of all access free pass that the Clintons possess. I think this is really important because this gets to not only the question about Trump's behavior, but also I think a sinking feeling among an increasing number of Americans. What you're describing is politics, particularly in DC and everything that has come out of Washington realistically over the past 50 years, but out of presidencies and you can look at people like Bill Clinton and the way that he acted behind the scenes, George Bush in plain view and the way that we got into things like the Iraq War or the way we paid for the war, we're in the fourth act of five acts maybe, maybe it's a four act play of the degradation of the way that the government works and in plain view. And this is both the blessing and the curse, I think, of the era of force transparency that most came into focus with WikiLeaks and the stuff that Chelsea Manning leaked and the things that Julian Assange did and he has sacrificed his life effectively for revealing the way the government does business, which is very much at odds with the idea that there are rules and that the people involved in this system are the ones who are maintaining the rules when nobody's looking. There are the equivalent of medieval craftsmen who put full faces on gargoyles that were in the eaves of Notre Dame that nobody would ever see. They're so dedicated to process and we know that that's horseshit and it is terrifying to see Donald Trump act like that but I think it's also important to recognize that we got a bigger problem here and it's not simply Donald Trump. So I think with characteristic perspicacity, Nick, you really put your finger on the heart of the matter. If you've ever been whitewater rafting, that your guide will kind of try to scout the river and what they're looking for is sort of what the currents are doing and where they should be on the river. You can tell a lot about what's underneath the surface of a river by what you can see on the surface in terms of boils of water and swirls and things. I think that's really a good metaphor for what's happening here. We are told that no one is above the law in this country and that is aspirational and completely false. If you're a sufficiently high-ranking politician, you are absolutely above the law, practically speaking and we've never really had a kind of an explicit conversation about just how far above the law. If Donald Trump beat somebody to death on the front lawn of the White House while he was president, would he have gotten a free pass or that? Probably not, but do politicians routinely get free passes for messing around with classified documents and showing them to people who don't have a clearance? Yeah, absolutely they do. So there are two questions we've never really had an explicit discussion about is just how far above the law are high-ranking politicians and I think that's a function frankly of your status in the organization and under what circumstances can your free pass be revoked? And I see Trump in some ways as essentially kind of the oaf at a catillion. He's this awkward guy that doesn't know the rhythms of DC politics and he comes blundering in. He's got his invitation, but he's dressed wrong. He doesn't speak right. He's drinking out of his flask and he's embarrassing everybody because there's a way that you're supposed to take advantage of that free pass and it's the way that the Clintons do it. He's embarrassed the establishment by taking advantage of his free pass and not doing it according to the customary norms. Do you think that is more an argument for revoking that free pass from everyone and saying, well, moving forward, presidents are not going to be so far above the law or is it kind of the opposite where we say, look, Trump could have declassified this. He could have waved the magic wand and this wouldn't have been a problem at all. So let's just recognize the political reality that presidents are kind of above the law and that all has to be resolved at the ballot box and through the political process. If we're gonna give high ranking political officials a free pass for violating certain laws then that suggests that perhaps those laws shouldn't be on the books at all and we'd be better off if we just dial all that back. Whether that's even feasible. In other words, I've been doing criminal justice reform for a long time and what I see is essentially a ratchet here. I'm not saying that you could never repeal a criminal law but it is extraordinarily unusual and the giving out of free passes to people whose job almost not requires but invites them to violate some of these laws is just the accommodation that we've reached there. We've got these overbought laws on the books. They're virtually impossible to repeal but we create a situation where a certain amount of free passes have to be handed out just to make sure that the machine continues to operate. If there's a path out of that morass, I don't see it. That was an excerpt from our live stream talking about the Trump indictment with the Cato Institute's Clark Neely. If you want to see the full conversation go here and if you wanna see a different excerpt go here and make sure to join us every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern when reason Zach Weismiller and I talk with somebody very interesting telling you something that you need to know.