There are plenty of reasons why 4 in 5 Americans see a two-tiered justice system. On Monday, federal officials gave the public another textbook example.
Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the U.S. attorney in Chicago to investigate nearly a dozen documents marked classified from President Joe Biden’s time as vice president found at a private office, according to CBS News. The documents, supposedly marked top secret, were found buried at a space Biden used when he was an honorary professor at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington. The center was a project of the University of Pennsylvania.
“The material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed,” CBS reported. “The documents were discovered when Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys ‘were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.’”
There were no federal agents raiding the president’s personal offices, no dramatic press conferences announcing the prosecution of an enemy of the state, and certainly no warrants granting law enforcement virtually unlimited scope to confiscate whatever they wanted.
It remains unclear what documents, exactly, Biden may have been stashing in the closet of an old workspace. They may not even be important, considering Washington has a chronic overclassification problem; just try compelling a federal agency to cough up public documents through the Freedom of Information Act. How the documents were discovered, however, shows Americans all they need to know about the political nature of the nation’s premier law enforcement agencies.
When former President Donald Trump was suspected of harboring classified papers in his Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago, Garland sent more than 30 plainclothes FBI agents to raid the 128-room complex as the administration’s personal stormtroopers. The attorney general’s foot soldiers even rifled through Melania Trump’s wardrobe operating under a warrant that allowed agents to confiscate any record her husband may have come into contact with when president. Federal officials ultimately carried away 15 boxes of material that the Justice Department claims featured the nation’s most heavily guarded secrets.
The Democrats’ latest investigation of Trump launched just months before the November midterms and has since been handed over to a special counsel. Biden, on the other hand, whose family looks guilty of nearly everything Democrats accused the Trumps of for years, remains untouched by the Justice Department. Garland refuses to transfer agency investigations of Hunter Biden’s business ventures to a similar special counsel independent of presidential oversight despite the clear conflict of interest.
The raid at Mar-a-Lago, meanwhile, was almost certainly conducted as a fishing expedition for a broader investigation. The search carried out with a wide-ranging warrant was authorized under the purported suspicion that Trump violated the Presidential Records Act, a rarely prosecuted law. Given Democrats’ lustful pursuit of Trump’s criminal conviction as the top item on their policy agenda for six years, it’s nearly impossible to believe Garland’s deputies were acting independent of political motivations.
The double-standard formula for prosecuting Republicans wouldn’t be complete without the media’s assistance. When Trump allegedly does something, it’s democracy dying in darkness, put down on its deathbed by the orange-haired chief of the MAGA insurgency. When Biden allegedly does the same thing, it’s a shoulder shrug complemented by spin from The Washington Post. Within hours of the CBS story’s publication on Monday night, the Post gave cover to the White House.
“The case will likely draw comparisons to Mar-a-Lago but appears quite different,” the Post reported. “Officials have said the Trump investigation concerns not just the possible mishandling of classified documents, but possible obstruction of justice or destruction of records.”
In other words, liberal pundits masquerading as journalists are right back to square one, repeating accusations about “obstruction of justice” as if the D.C. press were a broken record.
Where’s the FBI raid of any one of the Biden residences? It’s not coming.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
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