Insisting on similarity is a kind of lie to make Clinton’s conduct look worse than it was, to make Trump’s look more benign than it was, or both at the same time.
Many Republicans who know in their guts that, as I will establish in this piece, Trump’s conduct is palpably different from Clinton’s are publicly encouraging the corrosive myth that a double standard has been applied in the indictment of one and the non-prosecution of the other. Here’s Sen. Lindsey Graham doing just that on ABC’s This Week earlier this month: “Most Republicans believe we live in a country where Hillary Clinton did very similar things and nothing happened to her.” Note that Graham didn’t say that he believed we live in that world. Yet he managed to leave the impression that he was sympathetic to that view and that Republicans who held it were justified in doing so.
For the record, Comey did dispute Clinton’s guilt. His view was that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” because her state of mind, which he described as “extremely careless,” didn’t make out a crime.
Importantly, the crux of Clinton’s case, unlike Trump’s, was about gradations of carelessness, recklessness, and gross negligence—states of mind that can constitute felonies only in rare situations, like manslaughter. This fact alone already makes Clinton’s case qualitatively different from Trump’s.