Donald Trump is a furious former president who believes that a “deep state” conspired to rig an election and unjustly remove him from office. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have recognized that Trump would perceive the search as the federal government declaring a war against him personally and would respond with apoplectic fury. Whoever authorized this search warrant had better be darn sure that it was worth the likely consequences. A lot of Americans won’t easily grasp — or will choose not to grasp — why a former president keeping old papers, even ones containing sensitive information, in his heavily secured estate should be subjected criminal charges.

After all, Comey and the FBI didn’t see any need for criminal charges against Hillary in similar circumstances. In fact, Comey’s contention that, “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” indicates that pressing charges for this sort of thing is wildly unreasonable, or even absurd. In Comey’s account, it wasn’t even a close call.

And the contrast with Hillary Clinton is not the only case where Trump supporters can point to federal law enforcement effectively ignoring what appears to be a slam-dunk case of criminal behavior by a high-profile Democratic figure. Hunter Biden more or less confessed to lying on his paperwork to purchase a firearm in 2018, declaring that he was not “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance.” While promoting his memoir in spring 2021, Hunter Biden said that during this time, he was smoking crack “literally every 15 minutes.”