The swamp’s two-tiered system of justice was on full display in the classified documents cases of two presidents: Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Trump, the swamp-drainer-in-chief, faced 40 federal charges in a political witch hunt; Biden, the “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man,” got a pass.
Now, newly released photographic evidence from the FBI’s search of the Biden Center and the autopen president’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence confirm the “kid-glove treatment” the 46th president received compared to the raid-and-rifle approach agents took to Trump’s south Florida estate.
The photos, exclusively provided to The Federalist, were obtained through hard-fought litigation by the Oversight Project, the government watchdog that won release of audio recordings of Biden chatting with his ghostwriter about the classified records the 46th president had squirreled away. As in the famous tapes, the government fought for years to keep the photos out of the public eye.
“The Oversight Project is a dog on the bone,” said Mike Howell, president of the government corruption fighter. “What Biden did to this country was awful and so many people in positions of authority looked the other way or gave him amnesty for blatant abuse of our laws.”
‘Two Completely Different Postures’
Last week, Vanessa Brinkmann, Department of Justice Senior Counsel of Information Policy, authorized the release of more than 70 FBI photos of the documents agents gently organized. Some of the images are partially or completely redacted, but many show what Biden was hoarding at the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. and in boxes and a drawer at the former president’s Wilmington home.
The images preserve an array of files and binders filled with some intriguing, and apparently sensitive, information that Biden is accused of mishandling, retaining, and sharing. Biden stored files with labels like, “Iraq/Syria ’14,” “Foreign Policy,” “Obama Doctrine — Atlantic,” and “Biden Found Ben Harris,” presumably in reference to the former president’s chief economist at the Treasury Department and a key official at the now-defunct Biden Foundation. Harris was dubbed by The New York Times as “The Quiet Architect of Biden’s Plan to Rescue the Economy.”
Biden, according to the photos, also saved “Gmail Backup Codes,” “J.R.B. Facebook” files, and another folder titled, “Schumer DACA.”
Source: The Oversight Project
Other files were apparently filled with book chapters, contracts with publishers, and a folder labeled, “Zwonitzer Agenda Book Material.” The latter appears to reference Mark Zwonitzer, the biographer who ghostwrote Biden’s books, Promise Me, Dad, and New Beginnings. The writer’s interviews with Biden, obtained by Project Oversight, were central to Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
What is striking, according to the Oversight Project, is how the photos show the FBI agents handling the classified material with visible care. In several photos, agents are wearing gloves in their kid-glove treatment of the records, which they keep neatly organized, contained, and undisturbed.
“Compare that to Mar-a-Lago [Trump’s home], where agents dumped documents across the floor for cameras to capture — images that were leaked and blasted across every front page within days, priming the public to see Trump as guilty before a single charge was filed,” the watchdog said in a statement to The Federalist. “Two completely different postures — one designed to protect a reputation, the other to destroy one.”
Source: The Oversight Project
‘Manufactured the Visual Impression’
This is what weaponization looks like.
As FBI agents warned the Biden Department of Justice’s goon squad that they didn’t have probable cause for a search warrant to root through then-former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, Assistant Attorney General George Toscas reportedly said he didn’t “give a damn about the optics.” Cooler heads at the FBI advised that if top brass wanted to go through with the search of Mar-A-Lago, at least they should execute the warrant in “a professional, low-key manner.”
“I understand that this request may not go well at DOJ, however, it is FBI serving and executing the search and it will be our personnel who will have to deal with the reaction to that first contact,” states an Aug. 4, 2022 email from the unidentified agent according records uncovered late last year by Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Weaponization won.
The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022. They did so in anything but a “professional low-key manner.” The raid was very public and very political. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Biden’s attack dog, made sure of that.
More than 30 plain clothes agents from the FBI’s Washington Field Office and the Southern District of Florida swarmed the residence, grabbing up private materials in the search of Trump’s White House files. With red and blue lights flashing, agents spent nine hours combing through each of the sprawling compound’s 126 rooms — including the Versailles Master Bedroom that Melania Trump had renovated two years before, The New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported at the time. The first lady reportedly said she felt “contaminated” thinking about the agents — some of them masked — possibly rooting through her undergarments.
In the public-relations raid of the left’s political enemy no. 1, federal agents placed classified cover sheets on top of Trump’s documents before snapping photos of them. It was a choice, the Oversight Project asserts. A choice that “manufactured the visual impression of grave, top-secret material, feeding a media narrative before any legal process had run its course.”
You won’t find the cover sheets in the photos categorizing the evidence found in the FBI search of Biden’s home and office. Both presidents kept classified materials at their properties, so why the disparate treatment?
“The message the photos send is unmistakable: create the appearance of danger when it’s Trump, but quietly minimize it when it’s Biden,” the Oversight Project asserts.
‘Glaring Double Standard’
Trump was indicted on 40 felony counts, charges that he willfully retained classified documents and conspired to obstruct justice. The charges were brought by disgraced special counsel Jack Smith, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland’s political errand boy who also led the failed J6 prosecution against Trump. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ultimately dismissed the case because Smith was unlawfully appointed special counsel.
The special prosecutor in Biden’s case, Robert Hur, issued a report stating he would not bring charges. The former Trump-appointee who served as U.S. Attorney for Maryland believed swamp justice would never convict the cognitively diminished Biden.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote.
But the Oversight Project believes the photographic evidence demonstrates that Biden “commingled the classified information in his desk drawer” for his book notes.
“This establishes that Biden not only removed classified information from the White House when he left as Vice President (18 USC 1924), but he did so for the purpose of disclosing that information (18 USC 798) to make money,” the government Watchdog said in the statement.
The Oversight Project is calling on the DOJ to reopen its probe to determine whether the government should claw back the millions of dollars Biden raked in for his book because he earned the money thanks to illegally retaining and disclosing classified information.
“The photographic evidence released today lays bare a glaring double standard in how the Department of Justice and the FBI conduct high-profile investigations,” said Jeff Clark, the Oversight Project’s Vice President of Litigation. Clark himself is a victim of weaponization.
“While President Trump was subjected to a public spectacle designed to prejudge his guilt, the Biden handling was managed with kid gloves to protect a reputation,” Clark added. “The American people expect and deserve equal justice under the law, and we will continue using every legal avenue to ensure transparency and accountability.”
