Biden's sloppiness won't stop special counsel probe into Donald Trump's scandals: columnist

Washington Postcolumnist Jennifer Rubin noted that any revelations around President Joe Biden's documents found will not only have no bearing on the investigations conducted by special counsel Jack Smith.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to oversee the probe into the Jan. 6-related issues and the documents theft case Trump faces. While Biden is facing his document issues, what Smith is doing, according to Rubin, Trump is not less likely to face charges due to Biden's documents.

"Nothing about the Biden investigation should impede the Justice Department’s inquiry into Trump," she wrote on Sunday. "Indeed, allowing politics to color the Trump investigation would be a miscarriage of justice."

She argued that while Biden's lawyers bungled the P.R. from the beginning, nothing they have done is illegal. They did not conceal or attempt to hold back the documents. As was reported last week, the legal team was trying to work by the book from the beginning.

Once the documents were found, and Biden's team turned them over to the National Archives, the Justice Department asked that they secure the materials and "refrain from further reviewing them." At no point did the DOJ say that Biden couldn't hire someone with the proper clearance to look through other locations to ensure there were no further documents, explained Rubin.

She said that the lawyers failed to take politics into consideration in their search. Instead, they're "trying to placate the Justice Department" to ensure they could clear things up before the news became public.

"In slowing down their own search and proceeding in a piecemeal fashion, Biden’s lawyers deepened the impression they were dragging their feet," she also suggested.

There's no evidence that Biden could have somehow behaved differently to ensure there was no special counsel appointed. The problem, she continued, is that the public doesn't fully grasp the minutiae.

None of that matters when it comes to Smith's probe into Trump, however. Rubin thinks it'll likely blow over in short order because it will become clear to the special counsel that Biden did nothing wrong. Meanwhile, Smith can continue to decide whether Trump should be prosecuted.

"That’s as it should be," she closed. "We simply cannot accept a system that ensnares someone who attempts to cooperate with investigators while simultaneously allowing a megalomaniacal former president to walk off with top secret documents without serious consequences."

Reading the column, former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann pointed out that it's a good account based on what is known thus far. "But there remain a lot of important open factual questions."

Trump revealed last week that he kept the folders of the documents as a "cool keepsake." It's a comment that national security experts have called likely false.

Read the full column at the Washington Post.