Things Are Looking Pretty Weird for Merrick Garland
Presidential Reform Project co-chair Jack Goldsmith published the following opinion piece in The New York Times. The article details the parallel investigations into both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents. An excerpt of this can be found below:
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s symmetrical appointments of special counsels to investigate the classified documents imbroglios of President Biden and former President Donald Trump were necessary responses to superficially similar situations.
What has not been appreciated is how the parallel investigations will make it hard for the Justice Department to portray its judgments as principled in each case.
At this point, Mr. Trump’s legal problems seem more serious, because of both the scale of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and the seemingly obstructive behavior associated with their return. But the Biden matter is very serious, too, and has become more so with each new discovery of classified documents in his private Washington office and Wilmington, Del., residence. The Justice Department search of Mr. Biden’s residence late last week, which uncovered yet more classified documents, underscores the stakes. And we do not yet know how or why the documents ended up there, what was done with them, or what other documents and information might yet emerge.