Former President Donald Trump called for special counsel Jack Smith to drop charges relating to his mishandling of classified documents after a separate special counsel opted not to charge President Joe Biden over his own classified documents scandal on Thursday.
Shortly after special counsel Robert Hur’s report into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents was released, Trump called on Smith to drop the case against him immediately.
The former president declared that Hur’s report was proof of a “two-tiered system of justice and unconstitutional selective prosecution” and additionally accused Biden of “election interference.”
“The Biden Documents Case is 100 times different and more severe than mine,” the former president wrote. “I did nothing wrong, and I cooperated far more. What Biden did is outrageously criminal — He had 50 years of documents, 50 times more than I had, and ‘WILLFULLY RETAINED’ them. I was covered by the Presidential Records Act, Secret Service was always around, and GSA delivered the documents. Deranged Jack Smith should drop this Case immediately.”
Trump faces 40 felony charges in Smith’s classified documents case, including 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information and violations of the Espionage Act.
Meanwhile, Hur’s investigation determined that while Biden did mishandle classified documents, including some about his attempts to persuade former President Barack Obama not to surge troops to Afghanistan, his actions did not rise to criminal conduct.
The special counsel opted not to bring charges for a number of reasons, including what Hur detailed as Biden’s faulty and failing memory. Hur claimed that during interviews, Biden could not remember when his second term as vice president ended or in what year his son Beau Biden died from cancer.
“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,” the special counsel wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify a reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
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Biden said in a statement that he was pleased by Hur’s decision and claimed to have fully cooperated with the “exhaustive investigation.”
“I cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays,” he continued, noting that he sat for interviews with the special counsel’s office in the days following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel. “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed.”
