Two Tiered Justice System Strikes Again

The story is brewing that President Biden stored classified documents among unclassified papers in a think tank closet in Washinton, DC. Oh the horrors! Why has the FBI not raided his home? On the case today, at The Federalist is Margo Cleveland in an article entitled There's A Difference Between Biden's and Trump's Classified Documents Snafus. But It's Not What You Think. As she is at pains to point out, the National Archives and Records Administration cooperated with the Obama/Biden administration. Trump, not so much.

But the similarities between the situations remain striking, with the classified documents both at Mar-a-Lago and at the Biden think tank, comingled with unclassified documents, reportedly including “top secret” documents, and stored in a closet.

At least, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was private and protected by the Secret Service, while the Penn Biden Center was located at a busy D.C. office building that spanned some 10 stories and included numerous public areas, including a reception area on the roof that hosted weddings and other private events.

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So if the NARA had legitimate concerns about Trump’s possession of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, the NARA “would have worked to arrange for the documents to be preserved under the auspices of NARA control in a location chosen by Trump, as it had done with Obama.”

But the NARA didn’t work with Trump, with the records instead suggesting that “a backbench bureaucrat’s partisan grievance spurred the FBI’s nakedly political raid on Trump.” And that is where the real double standard is seen.

Who knows, too, what classified documents the FBI might have discovered had it raided all the Biden and Obama properties mere months after they left office, as agents did to Trump?

We’ll never know that answer, though, because the NARA properly partnered with the former Obama-Biden administration. And that is the appropriate comparator to consider, not how the NARA or the DOJ responded to the recent discovery of Biden’s secreted classified documents. Of course, given their very public mistreatment of Trump, the NARA had to refer the case to the DOJ, and Attorney General Merrick Garland had to assign a U.S. attorney to investigate the matter.

Once again, we see the difference in how the justice system works for Democrats and against Republicans.