In the aftermath of the pre-dawn raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in West Palm Beach, Fla., many were speculating that an indictment was imminent against the 45th President of the United States.
“I have finally seen enough,” wrote Brad Moss of The Daily Beast, “Donald Trump will be indicted by a federal grand jury.” He wasn’t alone. A Quinnipiac poll found that half of Americans believed at the time that Trump should be indicted over the classified documents found at his home. The American left has been wanting to pin something (anything, really) on Trump, and they thought at the time that his keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago was the proverbial nail in the coffin for him and his political career.
Even though that situation has turned out to be a nothing-burger (like everything else), the left still believes Trump committed a heinous crime and he will go down in flames for it.
Well, all that changed on Monday with the revelation that Biden had classified documents of a highly sensitive nature at his private office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.
Sure, the media is going into overtime trying to make the public believe that somehow what Trump did was worse, but if it were and Joe Biden didn’t do anything wrong, why did the White House cover up the story for over two months? Why did it wait until well after the midterm elections to reveal that Biden apparently had these classified documents sitting in his office for years?
The situation involving the Trump documents and the Biden documents are by no means identical — in fact, I think there’s a case to be made the Biden documents situation could be worse — but even Biden’s boosters at CNN realize this story is a problem for him, and that it makes going after Trump for possessing classified documents “almost impossible.”
“We’re talking about political street fighting here that is going to go on, with control of the House now, at a fairly high pitch,” said CNN’s John Millar. “And, you know, if you take the purely legalistic side of it and you get into the optics and the politics, what happened here is going to make it almost impossible to charge Donald Trump with any violation of classified documents.”
Don Lemon seemed to agree.
“I said that last night, it puts Merrick Garland in a very odd position,” Lemon said. “Did they know this was coming? This was November? I said, well, you know, look, I’m just asking here. Maybe Merrick Garland didn’t. Everyone’s wondering why he didn’t act — did he know this was coming?”
CNN legal analyst Katie Cherkasky, a former federal prosecutor, believes that a special counsel must be appointed to investigate. “I think that Merrick Garland is in a difficult position,” she said. “Ultimately, I think there’s going to need to be a special counsel appointed to look into whether this is a criminal offense or whether this is something that is prosecutable.”
I don’t know what will happen, but as it stands right now, we know that when Joe Biden was vice president, he did the exact same thing Trump has been accused of doing, only Biden never had the power to declassify the documents as Trump did. There’s no way for Garland to move forward with a prosecution of Trump while letting Joe Biden get a pass for it. In fact, the issue of mishandling classified documents has looked politicized since Hillary Clinton got a pass for her unsecured private email server and for obstructing the investigation of it. If the Biden DOJ prosecutes Trump while Biden gets a free pass, it will only add to the perception that the DOJ has been politicized and weaponized against Democrats’ political enemies.