The following is an excerpt from RealClearPublishing's new book by Joseph B. Sweeney, "Dangerous Injustice: How Democrats Weaponized the DOJ to Protect Biden and Persecute Trump."
Examples of the Democratic Party’s corruption of the American justice system for political means can be traced back to at least former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Continuing and escalating throughout Trump’s presidency, and after, the aggressive weaponization of federal law enforcement against Trump reached the unimaginable when on August 8, 2022, thirty Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, armed and authorized to use deadly force, raided the home of the former president of the United States. As Americans were witnessing this ignoble first in their nation’s history, FBI agents were searching every inch of Donald Trump’s home, seizing every single document from Trump’s presidency. They even took his passport.
Before the raid, most Americans assumed that such an event could only happen in a third-world country, police state, or nation ruled by an oppressive regime. And they were right. They just didn’t realize their country had become the latter two.
Sitting President Joe Biden’s administration subsequently filed two criminal indictments against Biden’s strongest political rival: one for interfering with the 2020 presidential election and another for violating the Espionage Act by mishandling classified information. These indictments were also firsts in American history, for no former president had ever faced federal indictment, let alone by an administration of the opposing political party. And no presidential administration had ever prosecuted the presumed challenger to the incumbent in the upcoming presidential election.
Ironically, while the Biden administration was prosecuting Trump for retaining classified documents from his presidency, it learned that Biden had also retained classified documents from his time as a senator and vice president. After covering up Biden’s malfeasance for months, his administration was eventually forced to acknowledge the discovery—but they still hid the details of Biden’s illicit conduct from the public.
Now, both the current and former presidents were being investigated for potential Espionage Act violations. But as I will show, these highly political investigations were handled very differently.
To understand the extent to which political party affiliation determined the conduct of these investigations, you need to understand the cases against Biden and Trump, and to understand the cases, you need to understand how national defense information is classified and protected. As a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lawyer, I spent decades working with classified information—and supporting investigations and prosecutions of the mishandling and theft thereof. Therefore, I’m particularly well suited to provide this needed context.
As with many legal matters, precedent is important—which is why I’ll review the few historical cases (most of which I worked on) where senior government officials were caught mishandling classified information. These cases involved fairly arcane laws and legal doctrines, but I have done my best to explain them in a manner that anyone can understand. All the cases where high-ranking officials mishandled classified information are, not surprisingly, saturated with politics. Every action and every inaction in these cases has a political undercurrent, crosscurrent, undertow, or outright tidal wave, and one cannot honestly analyze the cases without examining the politics. So be forewarned: the political autopsies you will witness, especially in Trump’s case, are graphic and disturbing.
After absorbing all this background, the stark disparities and political biases between the historical precedents and Trump’s case—and between Biden’s and Trump’s cases—will be shockingly clear. As will the necessity for a spectrum of reforms. Along those lines, I will share some thoughts on how we can improve the nation’s political climate, and offer blueprints for structural reforms to help prevent any future president or political party from ever again usurping the American justice system to persecute political opponents and retain power.
So, prepare yourself. You are going to see, through the eyes of an insider, your government at its worst. You are going to see how a political party turned American law enforcement into nothing less than the American Stasi.
