The sickening, pro-Democratic double standards at the Justice Department and FBI continue in full force.
The Justice Department’s decision not to have FBI agents or other federal officials present as President Joe Biden ’s personal lawyers searched for more classified documents is compelling evidence, yet again, of two-tiered law enforcement. The department’s excuses, meanwhile, are farcical.
“Mr. Biden’s legal team … discussed with the Justice Department the prospect of having FBI agents present while Mr. Biden’s lawyers conducted the additional searches,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
Bizarrely, the Justice Department declined, instead deciding that because Biden’s team appeared to be cooperating, it would rely on that team to conduct the expanded search unsupervised. Law enforcement officials told the Wall Street Journal that “one reason not to involve the FBI at an early stage: That way the Justice Department would preserve the ability to take a tougher line, including executing a future search warrant, if negotiations ever turned hostile.”This is illogical. Top legal analyst and professor Jonathan Turley tweeted that this “is a level of accommodation that would make a Kardashian blush .”
Andrew McCarthy, the former high-ranking federal prosecutor who is now an analyst at National Review and on Fox News, is famously evenhanded about applying procedural norms to all sides of the political spectrum. He agrees the explanation is nonsensical.
“It is on its face preposterous that introducing the FBI at an early stage would preclude getting tougher — resorting to a search warrant, for example — down the road,” he told me. “Not only is that common sense; we know it from experience: The Justice Department sent FBI agents along with a DOJ official to Mar-a-Lago in early June 2022 to retrieve documents with classification markings. That in no way prevented the Justice Department from ‘taking a tougher line’ by executing a search warrant two months later.”
Yes, it is a good thing that Biden and his lawyers seem to be so much more cooperative with federal authorities than former President Donald Trump was . Trump’s representatives repeatedly and dishonestly reported that all documents had been turned over, even as Trump reportedly directed numerous documents to be moved and hidden. Still, that’s no excuse for just “trusting” Biden’s representatives to do the right thing. When documents of a highly classified nature have been mishandled for six years, the Justice Department ought to take extra steps to ensure everything is handled properly. Surely FBI agents or top department officials with proper security clearance should have been on the scene as the search resumed.
