To demonstrate the hypocrisy of partisan double standards, Americans have already seen the revealing comparison of the treatment of Hillary Clinton with her 33,000 emails and Joe Biden with his five separate caches containing confidential records, versus the attacks on Donald Trump. That contemporaneous comparison demonstrates the two-facedness of Democrat pecksniffery.

As to history, does anyone believe that there are no confidential records to be found in the presidential papers in the libraries of, say, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes, or Obama? Or, to put it another way, can anyone recall even the slightest whisper of partisan concern expressed on that score, compared to the hyperventilation directed at Donald Trump?

Better yet, consider the policy implications of how Winston Churchill was treated. After leading Great Britain through the traumas of World War II, Churchill was ousted as prime minister. He then retired to his beloved private home, Chertwell, in Kent. He took with him "a vast quantity of wartime official papers" There was no raid on Chertwell. There were no criminal indictments. On the contrary, the British Government not only allowed, but encouraged, him "to remove them to his personal archive at Chertwell." The British government in fact kept feeding him all the archival material he wanted. Dozens of his research assistants and special consultants were given free access to the records as well.

That virtuous policy came full circle when Churchill wrote an acknowledgement of thanks in each of the volumes he wrote about the war. He said he had been under only one constraint: For the most sensitive materials he was asked not to quote them word-for-word, but to paraphrase them. Yet, Churchill assured readers, "[t]hese changes have not altered in any way the sense or the substance." What does this expression of gratitude tell us implicitly? It means that Churchill was indeed given full access at his home to sensitive materials, and the freedom to peruse and use them as he saw fit.

Given these external comparisons across time and space, it behooves every American to ask: which policy reflects the temperate, tolerant, measured, mature, and reasonable approach of a civilized nation, and which the intemperate, partisan, unbridled, juvenile, and unreasonable policy of a banana republic? For that matter, which one invites political abuse and the unseemly spectacle of early morning raids and indictments?

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