Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday pushed back on criticism that the Justice Department is treating President Biden more favorably than former President Donald Trump as the federal government investigates their mishandling of classified documents.
“The department has a set of norms and practices,” Garland said, answering media questions on the federal probe into the 80-year-old president for the primary time. “These mean, amongst other things, that we shouldn’t have different rules for Democrats or Republicans, different rules for the powerful or powerless, different rules for the wealthy or poor.”
Garland’s comments got here during a gathering of the DOJ’s reproductive rights task force.
He answered questions on how he would reply to those that argue Biden has been treated higher than 76-year-old Trump, and whether appointing a special counsel to analyze each cases was “good for the country.”
“We apply the facts and the law in each case in a neutral and nonpartisan manner,” Garland said. “That’s what we all the time do, and that’s what we do within the matters you’re referring to.”
“The role of the Justice Department is to use the facts and the law in each case in a nonpartisan and neutral way without regard to who the topics are,” Garland said about appointing Robert Hur as special counsel within the Biden document probe and Jack Smith as special counsel within the Trump case. “That’s what we have now done in each of those cases and what we’ll proceed to do.”
Some Republicans have accused the Justice Department of handling Biden’s classified document investigation with kid gloves in comparison with the federal probe into Trump’s retention of sensitive material from his White House days.
In August of last yr, over 100 classified files were recovered by federal agents during an FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Compared, the DOJ decided against having FBI agents watch over an initial seek for classified documents conducted by Biden’s lawyers at his Delaware homes — partially since the attorneys were deemed to be cooperating with the DOJ’s investigation, based on a Wall Street Journal report.
When federal investigators did a sweep of Biden’s Wilmington home last week, agents recovered six more pieces of classified materials, some dating back to his years within the Senate, Biden’s lawyer Bob Bauer announced on Saturday.
Highly sensitive papers – some reportedly related to Ukraine, Iran, and the UK – dating back to Biden’s days as vice chairman have thus far turned up at his Wilmington residence and at his former office on the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington, DC, where the initial batch of some 10 documents were found on Nov. 2, 2022.
“The double standard here is astounding. The underlying behavior at issue — a President’s retention of old classified documents dating back to a past presidency — is materially the identical in each cases,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month.
“But in President Trump’s case, that retention triggered an unprecedented raid on the house of a former president, rationalized with a thicket of partisan doublespeak,” Hawley added, calling on Garland to appoint a special prosecutor, which he did on Jan. 12.
