So the Trump–Biden comparisons are a distraction. The Justice Department’s decision not to charge Hillary Clinton for her homebrew-server shenanigans is much more significant to both Trump’s and Biden’s cases.
From the Justice Department’s standpoint, the failure to bring any charges against Clinton — either for mishandling classified information, destroying government files, obstruction, or lying to investigators — was always going to make a Trump prosecution difficult to justify. Personally, I think the takeaway here is that Clinton should have been prosecuted, not that Trump is innocent. But that’s beside the point.
No, what matters is that growing public anger about our two-tiered justice system is a major political issue, one that will factor heavily in the 2024 campaign. Even absent the existence of Biden’s own classified-information controversy, the president’s reelection bid would be significantly endangered if his Justice Department indicted Trump for conduct analogous to that for which Clinton got a pass.
[Andy comes to the same conclusion I have — that no one will end up getting charged. His argument is a little different than mine, but still similar. Andy thinks that they can preserve Democrats’ chances in 2024 (or that they believe they can) by letting both investigations drift to a halt. I think that they’re worried about potential corruption issues emerging in the documents Biden held and want all of these probes to go away. Those are not mutually exclusive, of course. — Ed]
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