---when you are President of the United States and you leave the White House for the final time, the very act of taking classified or non-classified documents before you leave the White House is a Presidential act. If an ex-President has classified documents, he didn’t acquire them as an ex-President. A President can classify and declassify at will and doesn’t need to follow any protocol – he is the executive branch.---
The majority ruling in the 1988 Supreme Court case Department of Navy vs. Egan — which addressed the legal recourse of a Navy employee who had been denied a security clearance — addresses this line of authority. "The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States’" according to Article II of the Constitution, the court’s majority wrote. "His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant." Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, said that such authority gives the president the authority to "classify and declassify at will."
Amy Berman Jackson, the judge presiding on that case, said a couple of very important things,” said Farrell. “That the president had an absolute, unreviewable right to take any records or documents that he wants when he leaves office. “ “No one can come back and second guess or double think or ask questions about what the president elects to take with him,” Farrell continued. In her ruling, Jackson wrote that “the President enjoys unconstrained authority to make decisions regarding the disposal of documents: ‘[a]lthough the President must notify the Archivist before disposing of records . . . neither the Archivist nor Congress has the authority to veto the President’s disposal decision.’”
---And here is the real kicker----there is no punishment for violation of the Presidential Records Act so the indictment is faulty for a start. There is no crime and trying to tie it to The Espionage Act is a joke.
Clinton's case was about personal records he made,Trumps case is about official government documents government agencies made(DOD,CIA,FBI etc) Clinton's case was about audio tape interviews he made and kept in a drawer,Trump stole documents that came from the government. The National Archives said Clinton's audiotapes were not official government records.The boxes of classified government agency made documents Trump stole clearly were.
Except for one thing---The Judge said the designation as to whether documents are personal or not is solely up to Clinton an ex-president. The Trump case should be thrown out poste haste.