The Biden administration informed Donald Trump’s lawyers that a grand jury had indicted the former president and he must surrender to a federal court in Miami on Tuesday. Trump took to Truth Social late Thursday to announce the indictment, proclaiming his innocence and calling it a dark day in America.
The news of the indictment quickly suffocated coverage of a confidential human source’s claim that the Ukrainian founder of Burisma had paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden. While the shift in coverage is unfortunate because the legacy media had finally begun to cover the Biden pay-to-pay scandal, the timing provides for the perfect juxtaposition of the federal government’s handling of the two cases and the media’s coverage of both stories. It also proves what Trump said in his social media thread: “We are a country in serious and rapid decline.”
A country cannot survive two standards of justice meted out based on the political preferences of the prosecutors. Yet that is precisely what Americans are witnessing.
On the one hand, we have the former Republican president who became the target of a politicized Department of Justice and FBI even before he set foot in the Oval Office. Special Counsel John Durham’s report revealed that reality. The attempts to destroy Trump continued throughout his time in office and included attacks by both law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Then, as Trump departed the White House upon Biden’s inauguration, a backbench bureaucrat with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) launched a crusade against the former president over documents. As I’ve previously detailed, the entire case was a set-up from the start.
Rather than work with Trump to agree upon the storage of presidential records in a mutually acceptable location, as the archivist had done with former President Barack Obama, NARA sent a criminal referral to the DOJ upon receiving records back from Trump that bore classified markings. NARA hadn’t even done that when evidence established that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton violated the equivalent “Federal Records Act.” In response to NARA’s referral, the DOJ promptly opened an investigation into Trump and used a grand jury to subpoena Trump and others, leading to the raid of Mar-a-Lago.
The indictment against Trump remains sealed, but from what the federal prosecutors reportedly told his attorneys, Trump believes the criminal charges relate to those documents, with the former president branding the case against him the “Boxes Hoax.” According to leaks to the press, Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with seven counts, including the willful retention of information related to national defense, one false statement charge, and one obstruction of justice charge.
Until Tuesday, we won’t know for sure the specific charges and, more importantly, the facts alleged to support the various counts. But what is clear now — abundantly so given the last month of revelations related to the FBI’s non-investigation of Biden — is our federal overlords have abandoned the rule of law.
It isn’t merely that there is one law for the rich and powerful and one for the rest of us. No, the FBI and DOJ have proven they are “the powerful” and will decide which law applies and to whom. Even more devastatingly, they have proved they control the fate of which politicians we are allowed to elect.
Trump, in announcing he had been indicted, highlighted the double standard on display related to the documents. “I have been indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that Joe Biden had “…Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor…”
Biden’s possession of decades-old, classified documents goes to show the government is normally lackadaisical about the mishandling of such papers. While that confirms the focus on Trump’s handling of documents was a get-Trump enterprise, it is the FBI’s burying of evidence that Biden accepted a $5 million bribe to affect foreign affairs that heralds the decline of America because that, to borrow a phrase from “the Big Guy,” was a big f-ing deal.
Ignoring Biden’s mishandling of documents while focusing on Trump’s is bad, but the public can conjure up phony distinctions. Biden cooperated; Trump didn’t, people claim. Trump misled; Biden didn’t.
But there is no getting around the reality that the FBI used its power to protect its favored politician by burying a report that Burisma’s founder Mykola Zlochevsky allegedly told a “highly credible” confidential human source he had paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden.
That’s not merely a matter of unequal justice under the law. We’re talking instead about the FBI using its power to decide our elections and the destiny of our republic. And that is why we are a country in serious and rapid decline — that and the corrupt press’s refusal to provide the check necessary to force those governing to right themselves.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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