The classified documents and obstruction charges against Donald Trump don’t compare to President Joe Biden’s handling of documents from which Biden was just cleared. Nonetheless, Trump’s lawyers have raised the ill-fitting comparison to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
“President Biden will not be charged, and President Trump should not have been either,” the former president’s attorneys wrote to Cannon earlier this month, citing special counsel Robert Hur’s report clearing Biden.
Yet, as special counsel Jack Smith observed in a filing Monday, Trump hasn’t “identified anyone who has engaged in a remotely similar suite of willful and deceitful criminal conduct and not been prosecuted.” Indeed, citing Hur’s report, the government pointed out that Biden’s special counsel recognized “several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s.” Smith’s filing to the Trump appointee went on:
Most notably, Trump, unlike Biden, is alleged to have engaged in extensive and repeated efforts to obstruct justice and thwart the return of documents bearing classification markings. And the evidence concerning the two men’s intent—whether they knowingly possessed and willfully retained such documents—is also starkly different, as reflected in the Hur Report’s conclusion that “the evidence falls short of establishing Mr. Biden’s willful retention of the classified Afghanistan documents beyond a reasonable doubt.”
So, far from helping Trump’s cause, a comparison to Biden merely serves to highlight the severity of the charges against the former president. The distinction should be too obvious even for Cannon to ignore. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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