Obstruction of justice
As you may have heard, classified documents have been found in the Indiana home of former Vice president Mike Pence. It is reported to be a “small number of documents.” Pence and his team immediately notified the right people.
That is not what this article is about. This article is about not allowing yourselves to be distracted by pundits who say all the wrong things for ratings and clicks. I saw one of those people on television the last night. This pundit was clearly in love with his words as he waxed poetic about how NOBODY should be charged in any classified document case.
He said the American people would be too confused to differentiate the differences between Trump’s case and Biden’s case. ( And now we can add Pence right in.) This pundit, as well as scores of others are WRONG. Do not let yourself be distracted by them. We have three people who were found to be holding classified documents. They are Mike Pence, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. But only one of them committed a crime.
Pence alerted the right people. So did President Biden. Trump sat on those documents. He pontificated about how they were HIS. He moved them around. He hid them. He lied. He obstructed justice. That is the focus of this article. Obstruction of justice.
The pundit I mentioned and others like him give the American people too little credit. Of COURSE, the American people have the intelligence to understand the differences. Obstruction of justice is an entirely separate crime from anything else. It means you restricted an investigation. It means one impeded, influenced or resisted “the due administration of justice.”
Say three people were working at an organization, and all three accidentally took home important correspondence from the company CEO. Two immediately realized their mistake and promptly brought the correspondence back. But the third person said: “I’m keeping it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me because it’s mine.”
The third person would be in a bit of trouble — because they were obstructing. That is the situation with Donald trump. Unlike Pence and Biden, he did not give what he had back. He sat on it, reportedly moved it around and lied about the number of documents he had, and over and over, he obstructed in every way. In the end, this is not a story of a few missed papers. This is a story of a former president who obstructed justice — over and over and over again.
