Most congressional hearings shed far more heat than light, but the testimony of special counsel Robert Hur was a welcome exception.
Yes, there was plenty of heat, but in the end, viewers witnessed a clear demonstration of how partisanship has corrupted the Department of Justice.
They also saw that Democrats are not troubled by that rank favoritism as long as their guy gets a free pass and the other guy gets nailed.
There are many causes for the deep polarization gripping America, but one of the most important is the contrasting ways Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been treated for their alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Trump faces a 40-count federal indictment, while Biden gets off scot-free despite a finding that he improperly kept and used such documents for 40 years.
Unprecedented probing
On its face, the disparate treatment smacks of a double standard, especially because no former president had ever been indicted for anything after leaving office.
That history created a formidable barrier, but Jack Smith, the prober assigned to Trump, was bulldog-aggressive and treated him like a common criminal, complete with a surprise FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
On the other hand, Hur, assigned to Biden’s case, was far more restrained and respectful of whom he was dealing with.
His team found lots of evidence of wrongdoing, but after interviewing Biden, decided not to charge him, insisting a jury probably would not convict because of his age and memory lapses.
Or, as Hur’s report famously put it, Biden would be seen as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur, in his testimony, resisted Dem attempts to say he “exonerated” Biden, saying flatly: “We did not exonerate him.”
He also acknowledged that Biden used classified documents and even shared them with a ghostwriter for a book that earned him $8 million.
As GOP firebrand Jim Jordan put it, “Joe Biden had 8 million reasons to break the rules.”
Although it’s possible there are reasonable explanations for such divergent treatment of the two men, including allegations that Trump urged his lawyer and others to lie about documents he retained, the parsing of statutes and circumstances has failed to dispel the smell that something is terribly rotten.
Dwindling faith in DOJ
Ours is an era of rapidly declining trust in government, with polls showing that as many as two-thirds of Americans have lost trust in the Department of Justice and the FBI.
It doesn’t help that the agency and the FBI, during the Obama-Biden administration, improperly spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
That shameful history still weighs heavily on the department’s credibility, especially with Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, running the store.
He is the one who appointed both Smith and Hur and decided which man would probe which president.
Given the partisan pattern under Garland, it is hard to believe he made his choices without thinking ahead to likely outcomes.
Smith is a noted head-hunter and has had big convictions overturned on appeal.
The investigative phase of his case was full of FBI leaks about what Trump allegedly did and he is pushing to put the former president on trial before the election.
If that’s not election interference, what is it?
And yet by his silence, Garland effectively greenlights the outrageous push.
Hur, on the other hand, gives every indication of taking a thoughtful and careful by-the-books approach.
Despite the fact that Dems tried to tar him with the fact that he is a registered Republican, as if that’s illegal, there was not a single leak from his probe of Biden.
Against that backdrop, it’s reasonable to believe the contradictory results were baked into the cake from the get-go.
That suspicion compounds an undeniable fact that Garland’s tenure has been marked by extreme partisanship, ranging from siccing FBI agents on complaining parents at school-board meetings to his clear reluctance to prosecute Hunter Biden.
Missing Biden millions
Garland sat on the president’s son’s case for years and his office was ready to let him walk until a federal judge exposed a concealed sweetheart deal that included an unheard-of pledge of immunity.
The inclusion of the pledge itself should have been a crime.
Out of embarrassment, and with whistleblowers pointing out how the probe into the family was hampered by Biden appointees at several junctures, Garland’s team suddenly decided that prosecution of the son was warranted after all.
Yet to this day, it has done nothing to follow the millions upon millions of dollars that flowed into the Biden family accounts from foreign sources.
We know the family got more than $20 million, that various family members got a cut and that brother Jim Biden wrote checks of $240,000 to Joe Biden, only because House GOP leaders did what Garland refused — they followed the money.
In what can be construed as a menacing response to those findings, the FBI recently arrested one of its own informants, claiming Alexander Smirnov lied when he said Hunter and Joe each got bribes of $5 million from a Ukrainian energy company owner.
The move gave the White House and its media mouthpieces ammunition to declare the GOP move to impeach Joe Biden DOA.
Note that the FBI never arrested Christopher Steele, also an informant and the author of the phony dossier commissioned by Hillary Clinton about Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia.
Apparently, not all informants are treated equally.
Nor did the FBI ever charge Clinton for keeping thousands of classified documents on a private, personal server, so not all presidential candidates are treated equally.
As for Garland, it is an undisputed fact that Biden made it known to him that he wanted Trump prosecuted over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
So much for the president’s vow to not interfere in criminal cases.
Before long, that case was also assigned to Smith, and Trump faces a slew of indictments there, too.
Meanwhile, other criminal cases have been brought against Trump in Georgia and New York.
There is compelling evidence the Georgia prosecutors, who have ethical and legal problems of their own, coordinated with the White House.
Then there’s an unwarranted, spiteful civil case in New York that has the potential to bankrupt Trump’s real-estate business.
All these cases have obvious flaws and all were brought by Democratic prosecutors, creating an inescapable impression that this is a coordinated effort to destroy Biden’s political opponent.
Dems emboldened
It’s the stuff of banana republics, but that hasn’t stopped Dems from declaring that Trump is the one who is a threat to democracy.
What they lack in facts they more than make up for with chutzpah.
Tuesday’s hearing produced no evidence or claims that dispelled suspicions about the clashing classified document cases.
If anything, the questions, answers and statements added support to the belief that different standards are what produced different outcomes.
Consider, for example, that just as the hearing began, Garland’s office suddenly released the transcript of Hur’s interviews with Biden.
Republicans complained about the timing, wondering why Justice waited until the last minute.
The interviews took place in October and Hur’s report was released a month ago.
Democrats notably didn’t complain.
The only sensible conclusion about the in-your-face timing is that Garland’s team feels so immune it doesn’t even try to hide its bias anymore.
Most likely, the transcript was withheld because some portions make Biden look bad.
Delaying the release made it harder for Republicans to read it in time to question Hur about the contents.
On top of all the other injustices taking place under Biden and Garland, this one’s a small matter.
But a reminder that they have no shame or fear.
