President Joe Biden has found himself in potential legal trouble following last week’s revelations that classified documents from the Obama administration had been improperly stored for several years by the former vice president in a previously used office space and his private home in Wilmington, Delaware.
The former director of the Office of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said recently that this Biden scandal “gets worse every day” and potentially even poses a threat to “national security,” the Conservative Brief reported.
The former national intelligence chief for former President Donald Trump also called out the “disparity” in how the discovery of improperly stored classified materials has been handled by the Justice Department between the former and current presidents, as the former had his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida raided by FBI agents while the latter was permitted to send his own personal attorneys to search for unauthorized documents in his possession.
“It gets worse every day”
In an appearance Sunday on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” former DNI Ratcliffe said, “It gets worse every day for President Biden” in relation to the classified documents scandal, and joked that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will soon “change her mantra” from “Joe Biden takes classified documents seriously to Joe Biden takes classified documents.”
Over the course of just one week, he continued, “We’ve gone from one set of documents in one location to four different sets of documents in four different locations, and we frankly don’t know where that’s going to end, where we’re going to be at this point next week, and so that makes it really difficult for Joe Biden.”
In response to the scandalous revelations, the White House has repeatedly insisted they are cooperating with authorities investigating inadvertently misplaced documents, but Ratcliffe wasn’t buying that excuse at all.
“It can’t be an inadvertent mistake when you do it four times. One time, maybe it’s an inadvertent mistake, but four times?” the former director said. “Not to mention, of course, his admission that anyone that would do this would be irresponsible. Well, in legal terms, that’s essentially an admission of gross negligence, which is the legal standard.”
“So, all of that from a legal standpoint, my concern as the former DNI is the national security standpoint, the fact that classified documents were kept at a house where a drug addict who has colleagues from communist China and unsavory oligarchs from Ukraine would have access to that,” Ratcliffe added in reference to the president’s son, Hunter Biden. “What could possibly go wrong? So, I think, again, it gets worse every day for President Biden with regard to this issue.”
The “disparity in the treatment” of Biden vs. Trump
Later, in reference to how the classified documents issue has been handled for the current and former presidents, Ratcliffe said, “I will tell you, as the former DNI, looking at the disparity in the treatment between President Biden and former President Trump, I mean, it’s remarkable.”
“And, you want to talk about dirty little secrets, I think that what we saw was an unprecedented raid of the former president as a way of targeting a political opponent,” he continued. “I think that was intended to lead to an unprecedented prosecution that is now here to hit a roadblock, if you will, named Joe Biden.”
“I don’t think that the Biden Department of Justice ever thought they’d be sitting around saying, ‘Well, how are we possibly going to prosecute former President Trump for conduct that President Biden has so clearly committed at a level that is so more egregious and with such a greater frequency?'” Ratcliffe added. “And I think that’s why they are in the mess that they are, and I think that is why you see [Attorney General] Merrick Garland punting with another special counsel.”
How does this play out going forward?
The Conservative Brief noted that former DNI Ratcliffe is not the only one to be troubled by this situation regarding President Biden’s inappropriately stored classified documents that date to his time as vice president during the Obama administration, as House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) has demanded answers and vowed to pursue the issue with an investigation.
As to whether this matter with the Biden documents will forestall the obvious efforts to vigorously prosecute Trump over essentially the same thing, as Ratcliffe surmised, that certainly remains to be seen, but it would be the absolute height of hypocrisy and glaring evidence of a two-tiered justice system if authorities went hard after one while effectively ignoring the other.
