The indictment of Donald Trump is a detailed recounting of his decisions to keep classified documents and to involve others in his alleged refusal to come clean about everything he had.
Based on a grand jury search warrant, federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago and the evidence they gathered was bolstered with FBI interviews of Trump aides, employees and even his lawyers.
Weaving in seized texts and emails from key moments, prosecutors have created a compelling picture of their case, with Trump’s personality and habits of deception coming through loud and clear in the 49-page charging document.
However, I believe that if federal prosecutors had empaneled a grand jury and obtained a search warrant for Joe Biden’s properties and if FBI agents had put his aides, employees and lawyers under oath, scoured their phones and emails and confronted them with evidence to get them to talk, agents would have found that Biden knowingly kept classified documents for many years in his homes and offices, including in the four years between his being vice president and president.
Honest agents unencumbered by any political bias of their own or their bosses’ might also have discovered that Hunter Biden and other family members and associates had access to the supposedly secret documents and possibly used them in drawing up their lucrative business schemes with foreign officials and businesses.
Instead, a special counsel assigned to the case appears to be about as vigorous as Joe.
I also believe that had the Department of Justice empaneled a grand jury and executed a search warrant on Hillary Clinton’s home and offices in 2013 or 2014 and seized her private computer server, phones and electronic devices, along with the devices of her aides and interviewed her lawyers under oath, FBI agents would have found many thousands of unsecured critical documents that were still in her possession long after she left the Department of State.
As it was, more than 2,000 documents deemed to be classified, top secret or confidential were recovered from her devices in 2015 and 2016, despite the fact that Clinton deleted some 33,000 emails she claimed were not work-related.
Although the FBI oddly accepted her claim, then-Director James Comey said Clinton was wrong to use a private server and there was evidence she and aides were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
“None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system,” Comey said before suddenly changing course and adding: “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Comey was out of line in publicly recommending against prosecution, but got away with it — and so did Clinton.
It probably didn’t hurt either one that Attorney General Loretta Lynch worked in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton and that Bill and Loretta just happened to meet during the probe in an Arizona airport and have a private conversation about, you know, golf and grandkids.
Tale of three candidates
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
For my money, that neatly sums up the challenge presented by the Trump indictment.
While his case will ultimately rise or fall on its merits, it is indisputable that Trump is being treated far more harshly than either Biden or Clinton were under very similar circumstances.
All three kept classified documents where and when they shouldn’t have.
Only one is being prosecuted.
All three ran for president, but only one had his campaign spied on by the FBI, an action later found to be unwarranted.
And only one was the victim of nonstop FBI leaks to the media alleging collusion with a foreign power that helped undermine his presidency, even though many of the leaks were found to be misinformation.
Does it matter that the one person subjected to these extreme measures by the government and media is a Republican, while the other two are Democrats?
Only a fool or a liar would deny the obvious.
Trump haters, some of whom call themselves journalists, justify that sordid history of misconduct against him by calling him every vile epithet under the sun.
He had it coming, they say, and believe he had no right ever to be president.
There is no concern of the unprecedented nature of the charges, only jubilation that he is the first former president in American history to be charged with federal crimes.
Many fantasize he will die in prison.
Bias just like old Times
The New York Times, which never fails to reveal its agenda, moaned that the Miami judge assigned to the case was appointed by Trump and “has shown him favor.”
The assumption seems to be that a Biden appointee would be more fair.
Really?
One does not have to think Trump is an angel, or even innocent in the current case, to believe there is something very rotten in Washington.
Two standards of justice, open and notorious, are doing more harm to American democracy than Trump could do in two lifetimes.
The decline of trust in government, including the once-hallowed FBI, mostly reflects actions taken by Democrats in recent years to gain or keep power.
As special prosecutor John Durham recently concluded, there was no justification for the FBI to open a case against Trump’s 2016 campaign, even as it inexplicably delayed or ignored potential avenues of investigation against Clinton’s family foundation.
And don’t forget that the phony Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, helped fuel the FBI’s zeal to nail Trump.
Think what that means: The Justice Department, with the knowledge of the Democratic White House, meddled in a presidential election with the aim of electing the Democrat and defeating — and perhaps prosecuting — the Republican.
And here we go again.
The federal case against Trump now, even if it meets the standard of the law, cannot be divorced from the recent history of election meddling, given that he is the leading GOP candidate against Biden.
In five years, perhaps a future Durham will look back on these events and write another report chronicling how the party in power again weaponized law enforcement to control an election.
In a brief statement defending the 37 charges against Trump, special counsel Jack Smith insisted there was nothing unusual about the case, saying, “We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everybody.”
Please, save it for civics class.
In reality, Biden appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed Smith.
Whether he likes it or not, the buck stops on Biden’s desk, especially because Biden let it be known more than a year ago he wanted Trump prosecuted.
Does anyone really believe it’s just a coincidence that Smith, under Garland’s guidance, has delivered what the boss wanted?
Meanwhile, Biden has a lot of dirty laundry himself, but Garland is protecting him.
Consider the evidence.
The Hunter Biden probe, now in its fifth year, reeks of favoritism, a charge leveled against it by IRS and FBI whistleblowers.
The evidence of various crimes has been public for years, and Joe’s connection is provable.
Nearly three years ago, he was identified as the “big guy” scheduled to get a secret 10% cut in a multimillion-dollar family deal with Chinese communists.
Those charges, based on The Post’s stories about the contents of Hunter’s abandoned laptop, were censored by Big Tech at the direction of the FBI.
The Ukraine $torm
Then there’s the newest dimension to Joe’s likely misconduct — the discovery that the FBI has been sitting on a charge since 2017, and renewed at least twice since by an informant, that he accepted a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian businessman.
Reports say Hunter also got $5 million in the same deal, and there are suggestions the money came from the head of Burisma, the corrupt energy company that hired Hunter for its board of directors and paid him millions while Joe was Obama’s point man for Ukraine.
Where’s the grand jury on that case?
Where are the subpoenas for Biden’s bank records and a house raid searching for evidence?
Where is the media firestorm?
Nowhere, that’s where, because Garland and the FBI have been sitting on the Biden bribe allegation without either confirming it or dismissing it.
We know the allegation exists only because a tipster told congressional Republicans, who demanded to see the FBI report of the informant’s story.
The possibility of Joe Biden’s guilt has many implications, including the specter that Congress impeached the wrong man in 2019.
House Democrats impeached Trump over a phone call with the president of Ukraine, in which Trump asked for help investigating whether the Bidens engaged in corrupt actions there when Joe was vice president.
It was an unfair, purely partisan impeachment under any circumstances, but even more so if Biden really was guilty of corruption.
Had that been discovered then, Trump would have been re-elected and Biden would be the one facing criminal charges.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
