The Hill reported in a headline, January 17, that Mitch McConnell, longtime foe of Donald J. Trump, "call[ed] on Department of Justice to treat Trump and Biden equally" on the matter of retaining classified information after leaving office.  And what did The Hill expect the wrongly placed Senate Republican leader to say?  Apply a double-standard to the former president?

But, in fact, by urging Attorney General Garland to treat Trump and Biden equally, McConnell was asking the rabidly partisan Garland to treat Trump and Biden as if the former were a pineapple and the latter a head of lettuce.  On the classified documents issue, the two circumstances are not comparable.  By calling on the DOJ to treat the Biden/Trump classified documents matters the same, McConnell would actually be asking the DOJ to injure Mr. Trump by the double-standard approach that has stalked him since he declared his presidential candidacy June 2015.

But Mr. Trump is a former president, no matter how the totalitarian left would deny this simple fact.  As a president, Donald J. Trump had authority to declassify government documents.

Recall, please, how Mr. Trump declassified the text of his July 2019 phone call with Ukraine president Zelensky to rebut false claims from the left.  (Notwithstanding the declassification of that phone conversation, the totalitarian, pro–kangaroo court Democrats continue to lie about the Trump-Zelensky chat, having made it a cause célèbre (impeachment matter).

As concerns Biden, the documents originally came to light November 2, 2022.  Some of them were documents he retained after his term as vice president ended, January 20, 2017, six years ago.  Does a vice president have authority to declassify government documents?  Apparently, the Deep State and NeverTrump hostiles are straining mightily to obfuscate the question so that another Big Lie can be foisted on the American people: that a (Democrat) vice president has the same authority to withhold classified documents and likely even more authority than does a (Republican) president (named Trump).

But the vice president does not have the same authority as the president.  After all, Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution provides the following: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."  The Constitution does not declare that the executive power shall be vested in a president and vice president of the United States.  All that the first paragraph of Section 1 says, concerning the vice president, is that this person shall hold office for the same four years as the president.

It makes no more sense to claim that the vice president can declassify government documents than to assert that the State of New York has three teams in the National Football League.  (The Giants and Jets are not New York state teams — unless the Empire State has annexed that part of New Jersey that is home to the Giants and Jets.)

And there are other, glaring differences in the classified documents matter.  There was an armed raid on the residence of the former president by government agents sent by Garland (and Biden?) to grab presidential papers and other materials only some 18 months after Mr. Trump left office.  It took six years to discover the classified documents retained by Biden.

It has not been disclosed how Biden's "lawyers" happened to be on the search for classified documents still in Biden's custody, some six years after his vice presidential term had ended.  For sure, that was not an FBI SWAT team sent to hunt for documents retained by Biden years after he left the vice presidency.

The circumstances are not the same, as McConnell (and the rest of the Deep State cabal) would, as matter of intentional deception, have the American people believe.  Indeed, Bryan Metzger, at Business Insider, August 9, 2022, reported that McConnell refused to comment on the FBI raid at the Trump Mar-a-Lago residence.  McConnell's call now for similar treatment for Biden and Trump is, arguably, a variation on a theme of crocodile tears.

It is as much fake news to assert that these classified document situations are comparable as it was fake news to claim that the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election to elect Donald J. Trump our 45th president.

How terribly sad it is that the Republican leader in the United States Senate is a man whose word is not to be trusted.  But then, how utterly bizarre that the Deep State intervened in the 2020 presidential election to impose on the country a rascal as president.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.