See if you can read the following for comprehensio
Post# of 123694
Short take, Trump be the one who is f'd.
IMO, this documents story will be over pretty quickly (for Biden, not Trump)
First of all I gotta say I don't really get the handwringing over the special counsel appointment. The Justice Department was investigating Trump's mishandling of classified documents while he was a private citizen, and three days after Trump announced he was running for president again, Garland appointed a special counsel. Because as soon as he announced, he stopped being a regular private citizen and became a presidential candidate.
Similarly, when the news broke that classified documents had turned up at a couple of Biden properties, Garland immediately appointed a special counsel. Because Biden isn't a regular private citizen, he's the president.
Appointing special counsels in both cases does a LOT to prevent the Republican House from interfering with either investigation. The special counsels can't be dragged to hearings and made to talk about the investigations. Neither the House, nor the AG, can interfere with either investigation.
So what's going to turn up here? In Biden's case, it's most likely going to end up being a simple error.
Documents were filed incorrectly at the end of Obama's presidency and some of them ended up where they shouldn't be. As soon as they were discovered, Biden's lawyers contacted the National Archives so that they could be recovered. They also immediately cooperated with further searches, which turned up a few other misfiled documents.
At every step of the way, Biden and his people cooperated with law enforcement and the National Archives. As soon as the documents were discovered, they went out of their way to make sure that they were recovered correctly, and that no more we missing.
So what is there for the special counsel to really investigate here? They'll look into how the documents got there in the first place, and they'll probably determine that ultimately some staffer packed some papers into a box that they shouldn't have.
Sure, the GOP will do all they can to make hay out of it. But this could end up being a relatively short-lived story -- it's not like the presidential election is two weeks away, when a story like this really COULD make a big difference (see: James Comey, Hillary Clinton).
The big news is that the special counsel was appointed in the first place. Once the excitement over the announcement has passed, the investigation goes quiet and there's nothing for cable news to bite on. The news cycle will move on to the next thing.
Then at some point down the road, the special counsel will release a report saying that someone somewhere mishandled documents but it wasn't done on purpose and no charges will be filed. End of story.
The point is that I don't think there's much to be afraid of here, since it will probably turn out to be a big nothingburger. (And to be clear, if it's NOT a nothingburger -- if Biden deliberately stole those documents and hid them on purpose so he could misuse them in future -- then that's a real problem and we should know about it. But does anyone believe that's actually what happened?)
Trump, however, is in a very different position. He knew he had the documents, he kept them purposefully, he refused to turn them over to the National Archives -- claiming that they belonged to him -- and after the National Archives negotiated with him to turn the documents over, he deliberately withheld additional documents. Given the serious possibility of obstruction of justice, Trump's special counsel investigation may not end well for him.
Either way, while the media is trying to spin this up as a major political disaster for Joe Biden, it seems to me that barring any unexpected bombshells, this story will be fixated on in the very short term and then forgotten about in a few months.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217556827
14. Jack Smith is looking into more than the theft of classified documents.
Garland knew about the stolen documents 2 years ago some of which involved sources and methods, some of which involved military nuclear weapons. Garland without a doubt treated Trump with kid gloves, allowing the National Archives to investigate until it had to refer the matter back to DOJ.
I will not repeat how DOJ gave Trump so many numerous chances to return what he had stolen until there was no other choice but to get a search warrant and still Trump obstructed and hid more documents.
I disagree with the comparisons between the 2 special counsels, one should have happened 2 years ago and the other one didn't meet the guidelines for having one.