The Daily Fuckup

Jan. 12, 2023 did not deliver a new filing in Donald Trump’s case, a courtroom ruling, or a fresh charge. It did add another headline to the classified-documents saga: Attorney General Merrick Garland said he was naming Robert Hur special counsel to review classified material found at President Joe Biden’s former office in Washington and later at his Delaware home.

Garland said Hur would examine the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents and related records. He said the special-counsel designation was meant to preserve the independence of the review. Hur’s office said it would pursue the facts fairly and without fear or favor.

The Biden disclosure immediately gave Trump allies a new way to compare the two cases. But the factual and procedural posture was not the same. Biden was the sitting president. Trump was a former president already facing a much more developed public record around Mar-a-Lago, including National Archives referrals, document-production disputes, a grand jury subpoena, and the FBI search of his Florida property in August 2022.

That made the political utility clear even if the legal situations were not interchangeable. The new Biden inquiry did not change Trump’s case. It did, however, put both document matters back into the same argument over whether the Justice Department was treating the two men consistently. For Trump, that was enough to keep his own documents fight in the middle of the conversation, whether or not it changed the underlying facts.