Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday countered criticism that the Justice Department is treating President Biden more favorably than former President Donald Trump as the administration investigates their mishandling of classified documents.
“The department has a set of standards and practices,” said Garland, who was the first to answer media questions about the federal investigation into the 80-year-old president. “That means, among other things, we don’t have different rules for Democrats or Republicans, different rules for the powerful or the powerless, different rules for the rich or the poor.”
Garland’s comments came during a meeting of the DOJ reproductive rights task force.
He answered questions about how he would respond to those who claim Biden has been treated better than Trump, 76, and whether appointing special counsel to investigate both cases was “good for the country.”
“In any case, we apply the facts and the law in a neutral and impartial manner,” Garland said. “That’s what we always do, and that’s what we do in the cases you refer to.”
“The role of the Justice Department is to apply the facts and the law in each case in an impartial and neutral manner, without regard to the identity of the subjects,” Garland said of Robert Hur’s appointment as counsel. . particularly in the investigation of the Biden and Jack Smith document. as special counsel in the Trump case. “That’s what we’ve done in each of those cases and what we’ll continue to do.”
Some Republicans have accused the Justice Department of handling the investigation of Biden’s classified documents with velvet gloves over the federal investigation into Trump’s withholding of sensitive documents from his time in the White House.
Last August, more than 100 classified files were recovered by federal agents during an FBI raid on Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
By comparison, the DOJ decided not to let FBI agents oversee an initial search of classified documents by Biden’s lawyers at his Delaware homes — in part because the lawyers were believed to be cooperating with the DOJ’s investigation. , according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
When federal investigators searched Biden’s Wilmington home last week, agents recovered six other classified documents, some dating back to his Senate years, Biden attorney Bob Bauer said Saturday.
Highly sensitive items — some reportedly related to Ukraine, Iran and the UK — dating back to Biden’s time as vice president have so far been displayed at his Wilmington residence and in his former office at the Penn Biden think tank Center in Washington, D.C., where the first batch of about ten documents was found on November 2, 2022.
“The double standard here is staggering. The underlying behavior at issue — the president’s retention of old classified documents from a previous presidency — is much the same in both 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 led to an unprecedented raid on a former president’s home rationalized by a thicket of partisan ambiguity,” Hawley added, calling on Garland to appoint a special prosecutor , which he did on January 12.
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