Special counsel Jack Smith argued Monday that President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents was worse than President Joe Biden’s own retention of classified documents.
In response to Trump’s motion to dismiss his case based on “selective and vindictive prosecution,” Smith argued there are no examples of anyone engaging in “remotely similar” conduct as Trump, pointing to a line in special counsel Robert K. Hur’s recent report that concluded “the evidence falls short of establishing Mr. Biden’s willful retention of the classified Afghanistan documents beyond a reasonable doubt.”
However, he did not mention that the report did find evidence of willful retention but declined prosecution because a jury would be unlikely to convict Biden if he presented himself “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
During his interview with Hur, Biden did not recall the years he was vice president and could not remember the year when his son Beau died, according to the report. Hur wrote that 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.”
Smith still argued Monday that Trump has “not identified anyone who has engaged in a remotely similar suite of willful and deceitful criminal conduct and not been prosecuted.”
“Most notably, Trump, unlike Biden, is alleged to have engaged in extensive and repeated efforts to obstruct justice and thwart the return of documents bearing classification markings,” Smith wrote.
He argued that Trump’s motion to dismiss the indictment based on selective prosecution should be “denied on this basis alone.”
“[Trump] intentionally took possession of a vast trove of some of the nation’s most sensitive documents—documents so sensitive that they were presented to the President—and stored them in unsecured locations at his heavily trafficked social club,” Smith wrote. “When the National Archives and Records Administration (‘NARA’) initially sought their return (before learning that they contained classified national defense information), Trump delayed, obfuscated, and dissembled.”
