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Representative James Comer, incoming chairman of the Republican House Oversight and Accountability Committee, failed to clearly articulate why the newly discovered classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s home and former personal office were worth the committee’s investigation, but not the classified documents found in the Mar- Former President Trump’s a-Lago resort.
“Do you only care about mishandling classified documents when Democrats do it?” CNN anchor Jake Tapper pressed Comer on Sunday State of the Union.
The conversation began when Tapper asked Comer to react to the latest news regarding five additional classified documents that were discovered at Biden’s residence on Saturday.
“Well, my concern is that the special counsel was called in, and yet, hours later, we still had the president’s personal lawyers, who don’t have a security clearance, still rummaging around the president’s residence looking for things,” Comer said, adding that he believed the residence was “essentially a crime scene, so to speak.”
Comer’s response, however, ignores the fact that the documents were discovered while White House counsel Richard Sauber, who holds a security clearance, oversaw the search of Biden’s home and while Justice Department officials were present, Sauber said in a statement Saturday. .
“As I was turning it over to the Department of Justice officials accompanying me, five additional pages of classified information were found among the material with it, for a total of six pages. Department of Justice officials with me immediately apprehended them,” the statement said.
Comer also said he wanted to subpoena the visitor logs at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, as well as the Biden Center for Diplomacy, the think tank that housed Biden’s personal office, “because this is the same type of investigation that Democrats were so outraged and enthusiastic and demanded it happen with President Trump. But Tapper noted that Comer never called for the Mar-a-Lago visitor logs to be released.
“So the hypocrisy here is great,” Comer said, adding, “We just want equal treatment.”
Tapper then confronted Comer with a clip of the congressman from November 2022, where he said investigating Trump’s mishandling of classified documents was “not a priority” for his committee.
“So what do you say to viewers who don’t understand why President Biden’s documents seem like a high priority to you, but President Trump, who took hundreds of other documents, didn’t comply with the subpoena, didn’t contact the National Archives or the Department of for justice to say, hey, we found these documents, is not a priority?” Tapper asked. “Do you only care about the mishandling of classified documents when Democrats do it?”
In his response, Comer revealed his partisan motivation. “We don’t know exactly what Trump has versus what Biden has,” he said. “At the end of the day, my biggest concern isn’t the declassified documents, to be honest with you. My concern is how there is such a disparity in how former President Trump was treated by raiding Mar-a-Lago, by taking security cameras, by taking pictures of documents on the floor, by going through Melania’s closet, against Joe Biden. They’re like OK, your personal lawyers who don’t have a security clearance, yeah, they can get through.
Again, Tapper went through a long list of how Trump refused to cooperate with the Justice Department and lied about having the documents. “There’s a big difference in how President Biden and his team responded and how President Trump and his team responded,” Tapper said. “The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago because Trump — for more than a year — refused to turn over documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, which were trying to get them back into safe hands. Trump and his lawyers lied about it. Trump lied about not having classified documents.
Comer then returned to Trump’s apology. That he as president has the power to declassify any document he decides. But Tapper noted that the Obama administration had authorized the vice president to declassify documents as well.
“So the average American who doesn’t really care whether the person you’re investigating has a D or an R next to their name can listen to this interview and think I have no problem with anything he’s investigating when it comes to Biden , but why isn’t he investigating all the same things when it comes to Trump?” Tapper said, noting, “There are questions about influence peddling when it comes to the Trump family. There are questions about visitor logs when it comes to Mar-a-Lago. I mean, if you’re going to run the Oversight and Accountability Committee, which you renamed, for the American people, not just the Republicans, it seems to me that everything should be investigated.
Comer then said he did intend to investigate “influence peddling with respect to the Trump administration,” but then added, “But in terms of the investigation into President Trump, there have been so many investigations into President Trump, I don’t think we should to spend a lot of time investigating President Trump because that’s what the Democrats have done for the last six years. So no one has been investigated more than Donald Trump.
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