January 2023
What’s that saying about those who live in glass houses? Oh, right!
Trump is “guilty” of “mishandling classified documents” and “mentally unfit” to hold public office. Biden? Nothing to see here!
From the “Be careful what you wish for” file, Democrats have been in an state of excitement for many months at the prospect that former President Donald Trump may finally be indicted for his handling of classified documents found at his Florida home at the Mar-a-Lago resort.
On 8 August 2022, the FBI, accompanied by heavily-armed Secret Service Agents, raided the home of the former U.S. President, something that has never happened to any other President, current or former.
The FBI reported recovering 100 documents with classification markings, including 18 marked top secret, 54 marked secret and 31 marked confidential. The documents were found in Trump’s bedroom, an office and a first-floor storage room, according to court documents.
It took very little time for the usual Trump opponents to loudly proclaim that the former President would finally be locked-up and forever be banned from holding public office.
Now it has come out that the current occupant of the White House, “Sleepy Joe” Biden, also had a few classified documents stashed away in a few places where perhaps, they shouldn’t have been stored.
White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library in December. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there. This is in addition to the collection of classified documents were found at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, some of which were stored in his garage next to his Corvette, and “a small number of documents with classified markings” that were discovered on 2 November 2022, in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank in Washington, where Biden kept an office at the Penn Center after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his 2020 presidential campaign.
The President of the United States has the authority to declassify any documents that he wishes to declassify. Regardless of whether you think that a President should be able to do that or not, is not the point. It’s the law and until a President changes that law, it remains a prerogative of the office.
However, that prerogative dos NOT extent to a Vice-President, which was the office that now-President Joe Biden held at the time these documents were removed from the government’s possession and into Biden’s personal possession.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have now launched an investigation into the Justice Department’s handling of improperly stored classified documents possessed by Biden, and they questioned whether his son, Hunter, had access to any of them.
OK, so one issue here is whether Presidents Trump and Biden should have had classified documents in their personal possession or not, but I think it’s just as important to clarify the other issue this raises; the elephant in the room, shall we say: if it’s an major crime for President Trump, then it has to also be a major crime for President Biden. End of discussion.
So far, the apologists for President Biden are saying that he “inadvertently” had possession of the classified documents; that it was a mistake that he quickly rectified, once advised of the problem, by immediately returning the classified documents to the proper authorities, unlike President Trump, who argued that he had done nothing wrong.
Well, it doesn’t take a law degree to know that intent has nothing to do with this type of offence, which is and absolute liability offence; one that doesn’t require intent in order to establish guilt. Even someone who has watched an episode or two of Law and Order could tell you that.
Oh yes, let’s not forget about the matter of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling (mishandling) of classified material. You remember; the material that was stored on an unsecured, private computer server in her house. So, there’s that too.
As Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz pointed out recently on Fox News: “There is enough evidence here to indict Trump, but Trump will not be indicted, in my view, because the evidence doesn’t pass what I call the Nixon-Clinton standards. The Nixon standard is, a case has to be so overwhelmingly strong that even Republicans support it, and the [Hillary] Clinton standard is, why is this case more serious than Clinton’s case where there wasn’t the criminal prosecution?”
In other examples of hypocrisy, Democrats spent pretty much Trump’s entire tenure (and then some) claiming that he should be removed under the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, for being “unfit for office” and “…unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office…” due to “mental instability.”
It’s been heavily reported over the past two years that Biden has declining cognitive abilities, as seen in numerous news clips that show an, at times, fumbling and confused man. Somehow, no one seems to care about that, despite Texas Congressman Ronny Jackson (TX-13), the White House Physician during the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, sending “…a letter to President Biden in June 2021 and again in February 2022, calling on him to do the same. His requests have been ignored.”
To refresh everyone’s memory, Congressman Jackson was the same White House Physician whom, in 2018, administered a cognitive teat to President Trump, following demands from Democrats, one that he passed, thus setting a president.
Just to clarify, many certainly don’t say it in a mean-spirited way, myself included, but it’s getting harder and harder to deny that the 80-year-old President Biden is declining, as tends to happen at that age.
Sources: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/security-concerns-top-secret-documents-mar-a-lago-1.6658716, https://apnews.com/article/biden-classified-documents-trump-side-by-side-fb2c4ebccdbdbb9039c1c5e227b1da53, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-biden-classified-documents-1.6714313, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/07/trump-25th-amendment-mental-health-327503, https://ca.news.yahoo.com/will-trump-be-indicted-over-classified-documents-found-at-mar-a-lago-201118924.html?, https://jackson.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=438, https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/hanson-what-triggered-all-the-political-hysteria.
