In January, multiple media reports exposed President Joe Biden for allegedly mishandling and improperly storing classified government documents at an old Washington D.C. office he previously used as well as in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
A special counsel was appointed to investigate the matter but reports now indicate that the probe is set to conclude with little more than a final report and no criminal charges, according to Breitbart.
If those reports prove to be accurate, this is just the latest grotesque display of an egregious political double standard in the justice system, wherein powerful Democrats, like Biden, skate past accountability for alleged wrongdoing while Republicans, like former President Donald Trump, are indicted and run through the legal wringer.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Special Counsel Robert Hur, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January to investigate President Biden's alleged mishandling of classified documents found in his old D.C. office space and his Delaware home, was "preparing a report that is expected to be sharply critical of how he and his longtime aides handled the material."
However, per the Journal's anonymous sources who were "familiar" with the matter, "the probe isn't likely to result in a criminal case" against Biden or any of his current and former aides.
Similar news was reported separately that same day by CNN, which cited its own unnamed sources as claiming that Hur was "not expected to charge anyone" in relation to Biden's apparent unauthorized retention of classified government documents, but rather was finalizing a report that would provide "significant detail" about what the probe discovered over the past 11 months.
That seemed to bolster an earlier report from CNN that "charges appeared unlikely" in the case based on anonymous leaks of the "investigators’ line of questioning" as well as that there had been "no discernible grand jury activity" related to the matter.
The CNN report acknowledged that "A decision to not pursue charges is likely to draw criticism from Donald Trump and his allies," and that predictable yet prescient assertion was quickly proven true.
The Hill reported that former President Trump exploded with rage at the apparent double standard, given that he is facing multiple criminal charges pressed by Special Counsel Jack Smith over the boxes of government documents, some of which were classified, were retained when he left the White House and stored at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida instead of turned over to the National Archives.
"Wow! Fake news CNN, through a leak from the Department of Injustice, has just reported that no charges will be filed in the (much bigger than mine!!!) Crooked Joe Biden documents case," Trump said in all caps in a Friday morning post to his Truth Social account. "We are living in a very corrupt country!"
He followed that up just 30 minutes later with a second post that simply declared, "SELECTIVE PROSECUTION!!!"
To be sure, the former president and his supporters, as well as many neutral observers, will furiously decry what seems to be a blatant and obvious double standard and "selective prosecution" as Trump faces serious criminal charges while Biden appears set to dodge any consequences for essentially doing the same thing -- retaining classified government documents without authorization that should have been turned over to the National Archives when they left office.
Of course, defenders of the current president will argue that the two cases are vastly different in that Biden and his attorneys purportedly cooperated fully and swiftly with the National Archives once the documents had been found, while Trump and his people are said to have argued with and delayed responding to the National Archives when questions were raised about his documents.
None of that should matter, though -- and setting aside the fact that Biden's attorneys only came clean after they were exposed by media reports, or Trump's claim of executive authority to declassify and retain documents that Biden didn't have when he was vice president or senator -- as the underlying alleged crime is pretty much the same and both cases should have been handled similarly, meaning either both face charges or both get to go clean.
