Like former President Donald J. Trump, Lt. Col. Robert Birchum was accused in Florida of mishandling labeled paperwork. Like the previous president, he was charged with violating the Espionage Act.

But not like Mr. Trump, Mr. Birchum, 55, a extremely adorned Air Force intelligence officer, took full duty. His lawyer mentioned he expressed “true remorse.” He even cooperated with investigators, offering details about how he stored a whole lot of secret papers for nearly a decade in his residence, an abroad workplace and a storage pod.

Despite all that, Mr. Birchum nonetheless obtained three years in jail when he was sentenced this month.

The case and others prefer it are warning indicators for Mr. Trump, who faces 31 counts of willfully retaining nationwide protection secrets and techniques, every of which carries a most sentence of 10 years in jail.

The former president has additionally been charged with conspiracy to hinder justice, corruptly scheming to cover data from the federal government and mendacity to investigators.

Eric Roper, Mr. Birchum’s lawyer, mentioned Mr. Trump was clearly in authorized peril.

“Yes, he definitely faces some serious consequences like going to prison if convicted,” Mr. Roper mentioned. “The charges are serious, as evidenced by my client’s sentence and others. And my client did not have any aggravating factors.”

Unlike Mr. Birchum, whose sentence was almost certainly lowered as a result of he cooperated with prosecutors and was not charged with orchestrating a cover-up, Mr. Trump has signaled no willingness to cede any floor. He has to this point mentioned he did nothing flawed and is waging a full-throated assault in opposition to federal prosecutors.

The authorities has accused Mr. Trump of taking a whole lot of paperwork, a lot of them extremely labeled, from the White House when he left workplace in 2021. Prosecutors tried to retrieve the paperwork, however Mr. Trump resisted, inflicting the federal government to acquire a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, his property in Florida.

In a 49-page indictment unsealed on Friday, the federal government detailed 31 labeled paperwork that Mr. Trump had in his possession regarding army and nuclear capabilities of the United States and overseas international locations. Other paperwork included details about army contingency planning, together with plans for a possible U.S. assault on Iran.

Prosecutors alleged that Mr. Trump conspired with Walt Nauta, his aide, to hinder the investigation by hiding paperwork in a toilet and different areas at Mar-a-Lago after receiving a subpoena. They additionally accused Mr. Trump of inflicting his legal professionals to offer false data to the federal government that each one the paperwork had been accounted for.

During his first run for the presidency, Mr. Trump repeatedly castigated Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, for her use of a private electronic mail server throughout her time as secretary of state below President Barack Obama.

“In my administration,” Mr. Trump mentioned in the summertime of 2016, “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

In current days, allies of Mr. Trump have accused the Justice Department of a double commonplace, saying they need to have prosecuted Mrs. Clinton.

In truth, the instances are very totally different, with prosecutors accusing Mr. Trump of attempting to maintain paperwork from investigators after the subpoena. Prosecutors in Mrs. Clinton’s case mentioned they didn’t have sufficient proof to cost her, together with below the Espionage Act. A Justice Department inspector common’s report that checked out Mrs. Clinton’s case didn’t take challenge with that conclusion.

Since 2018, there have been a few dozen legal prosecutions of individuals retaining labeled or nationwide protection data, in line with the Justice Department.

In most of the instances, the defendants obtained prolonged jail sentences, reflecting how severely the federal government takes defending the nation’s secrets and techniques.

Two former analysts on the National Security Agency — Harold Martin and Nghia Hoang Pho — obtained 9 years and 5 and a half years in jail, respectively, for taking labeled data residence. Mr. Martin, a Navy veteran, admitted that for practically 20 years, he stuffed his residence workplace, automobile and backyard shed with 50 terabytes of knowledge, a lot of it stamped “classified.” It was one of many largest thefts of labeled paperwork in historical past, officers mentioned.

In April, Jeremy Brown, 48, a former Special Forces sergeant, was sentenced to seven years and three months in jail for retention of labeled data in addition to different crimes. Mr. Brown was briefly a part of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia, and was photographed in fight apparel in the course of the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In that case, Mr. Brown refused to simply accept duty for wrongdoing. During his sentencing, the choose mentioned that he had been “defiant to the end.”

Last yr, Kendra Kingsbury, an F.B.I. analyst, pleaded responsible to 2 counts of unlawfully retaining nationwide safety paperwork at her Dodge City, Kan., residence. Prosecutors mentioned she had retained 386 labeled paperwork on exhausting drives and compact discs.

She is scheduled to be sentenced subsequent week, in a case that can be watched carefully by the federal government and Mr. Trump’s authorized crew. David Raskin, one of many prosecutors who dealt with Ms. Kingsbury’s case, is now working for Jack Smith, the particular counsel main the case in opposition to the previous president.

Mr. Trump’s case is the primary time a former president has been charged with a federal legal violation. But there have been earlier situations of prosecutions involving the mishandling of labeled data by politicians or extremely positioned authorities officers.

All of these instances concerned misdemeanor allegations, not felony expenses of violating the Espionage Act.

In the late Nineteen Nineties, John M. Deutch, a former C.I.A. director, was below investigation by the Justice Department for mishandling labeled data. He was contemplating pleading responsible to misdemeanor expenses however was pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his final day in workplace.

In 2005, Sandy Berger, Mr. Clinton’s former nationwide safety adviser, was ordered by a choose to pay a $50,000 high-quality for illegally taking labeled paperwork from the National Archives. Mr. Berger pleaded responsible to a misdemeanor, saying he made an trustworthy mistake whereas making ready to testify for the 9/11 Commission.

A decade later, David H. Petraeus, one other former C.I.A. director, pleaded responsible to a misdemeanor cost of mishandling labeled supplies. He was positioned on probation and fined $100,000.

Mr. Petraeus had stored eight private notebooks with extremely labeled data, together with identities of covert property and warfare methods, and shared the notebooks with Paula Broadwell, his mistress and biographer.

In his case, prosecutors found a recording of Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell speaking in regards to the notebooks.

“I mean, they are highly classified, some of them,” Mr. Petraeus advised her. He added, “There’s code-word stuff in there.”

Similarly, in Mr. Trump’s case, prosecutors have a doubtlessly damning recording of the previous president speaking at his residence in Bedminster, N.J., with a author and a writer engaged on a guide associated to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of employees.

“Secret. This is secret information,” Mr. Trump boasts as he reveals his friends a doc. “Look, look at this.”

The authorities alleges that Mr. Trump later says on the recording that he had not declassified the doc he was displaying them.

“But this is still a secret,” he says, prompting laughter from somebody within the room.

In the case involving Mr. Birchum, he spent greater than 29 years as an enlisted airman and officer within the Air Force. He accomplished a number of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and earned the Bronze Star. In one occasion, Mr. Birchum’s intelligence work “supported over 40 strikes against foreign terror networks, resulting in the capture or killing of over 800 enemy combatants,” in line with a movement by his lawyer asking for a lighter sentence in his case.

The sentencing memo mentioned Mr. Birchum demonstrated “exceptionally poor adherence” to his obligation to safeguard the nation’s secrets and techniques, however he didn’t preserve labeled materials “for personal gain or with malicious intent to harm the country.”

In that movement — written a month earlier than Mr. Trump’s indictment was unsealed — Mr. Roper, the lawyer, acknowledged the unlikely similarities between an Air Force officer and his commander in chief.

“Among others,” Mr. Roper advised the courtroom, his consumer “now shares a stage” with Mr. Trump.