If only we could indict the Department of Justice for felony mishandling of classified documents.

Attorney General Merrick Garland and his accomplices at the FBI appear to deserve it, at least if an eye-popping Wall Street Journal report published Tuesday has it right. The report harpoons a dubious defense President Biden’s apologists have floated: the notion that Biden did not know about the classified documents he was illegally retaining, notwithstanding that he — not an aide, not a lawyer, but he himself — is the common denominator tying together the multiple locations where classified intelligence has been found (his office, his homes, his garage, his library).

The Journal reports that the Biden team decided to have aides who did not have security clearances search the president’s private residences for additional classified documents after the first batch was found. Perhaps even worse, the Biden Justice Department declined to have the FBI present and overseeing these searches, even though it had abundant reason to know more secret intelligence would be found, as well as a duty to ensure that the bureau both preserved evidence and protected national security.

[They didn’t insist on an FBI search of Hillary Clinton’s servers either. And it’s not really clear whether they insisted on that with Donald Trump, and when. At least for a while, the National Archives worked through Trump’s lawyers over disputed documents before getting the FBI involved, and the DoJ was involved in those negotiations as well before the raid at Mar-a-Lago. — Ed]