The people who need to see/understand this live in a different reality where uncomfortable things like this are ETL'd into righteous anger towards people they don't like.

This is the deep state they've been worried about, this is the boot that will tread on them.

EDIT: parent comment was highest ranked comment for the article and is now at the bottom?

Chances of that happening are zero right now.

You forget who the president is. They will get away with all of this and everything else. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try but lets be realistic here.

I fully believe there's a stack of pardons in Trump's drawer for everyone involved in this debacle. I can't imagine breaking so many laws all over the government if you thought you'd ever have to face consequences. The alternative to pardons in preventing the next congress & administration from cleaning this up is too dire to really contemplate.

Not really possible since they would be pardoned even if anyone was ever willing to prosecute them.

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Writing ai slop? Thanks !

Explain please.

The problem with prosecuting them – they are employees of a White House office, doing what their bosses told them to do, and it is clear their bosses are carrying out the President's wishes.

If Joe Blow off the street walks into a federal agency and takes all their data – open and shut case, throw the book at them, see you in a few decades.

If someone from the White House walks into a federal agency, tells the agency leadership "the President wants me to take all your data", and the agency leadership replies "sure, go right ahead" – not a scenario people were expecting, so the existing laws haven't been crafted to clearly criminalize it. Maybe some enterprising prosecutor can find a way to map it to the crimes on the statute book, maybe it is just too hard. But even if the prosecutor overcomes that hurdle, it will be far from easy to convince the jury / trial judge / appellate courts that the legal elements of the crime are actually met – and if it actually gets as far as a conviction upheld by the appellate court, what do you think the conservative SCOTUS majority are going to do with that when they get it? And many prosecutors, foreseeing those low odds of ultimate success, will stop before they even get to an indictment.

So, I think the odds of anyone ultimately being convicted over this are low, even if Trump never pardons them.

Maybe, Congress might pass a law to make it more clearly illegal, which might make it easier to prosecute if a future administration repeats the same behavior.

EDIT: if people are downvoting this because they think my analysis of the likelihood of successful criminal prosecution is wrong, it would be great if they could reply to explain where they think I got it wrong

People voted for this

You’d have to prove a crime here to send someone to jail, correct? What would the charges be?