Did you fancy that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents proved that Biden might be held accountable? Don’t buy it, says famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
“Everyone knows that President Biden will not be indicted for classified material showing up in various locations,” he writes. “First of all, a sitting president cannot constitutionally be indicted. The Justice Department recognizes that in its own rules and guidelines. Nor is this a case where others may be subject to indictment.”
However, Dershowitz argued that even if the investigation revealed Biden committed a criminal offense, it “would not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, which are the criteria for impeachment.”
This is probably true, but given the precedent set by the Democrats with their two partisan impeachments of President Trump, that seems immaterial. So why appoint a special counsel at all? Well, Dershowitz argues that Garland had to because he’d already done so with Trump.
Related: The Appalling Double Standard in the Biden and Trump Classified Documents Cases
Dershowitz expects that neither Trump nor Biden will ultimately face any charges.
“Even if one or both special prosecutors were to recommend indictment — an unlikely prospect — Attorney General Garland would not follow their advice,” he predicts. “Only, he knows that if only one of them were to be prosecuted, the divisions in this country would be greatly exacerbated. So the end result will be that neither is prosecuted.”
In the end, the blame for this politicized impasse belongs to the Democrats, for what Dershowitz calls “their showy overreaction to Trump’s derelictions, manifested by an unjustified search and seizure.”
Democrats have long been too blinded by their own hatred of Republicans to see how their actions establish a precedent for the same tactics to be used on them, be it politicizing the filibuster or impeaching a president twice over bogus pretenses. Power shifts back and forth in Washington fairly regularly, yet Democrats only seem to play by the assumption that they’ll always be in control.
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