Former President Donald Trump slammed Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Friday for failing to charge President Joe Biden with mishandling classified documents, claiming the Justice Department is engaged in “selective prosecution” against him, while arguing that his own alleged mishandling of sensitive material was “peanuts by comparison.”
“It was just announced that Joe Biden’s Department of Injustice will bring zero charges against crooked Joe despite the fact he willfully retained undisclosed droves of ultra-classified national security documents,” Trump said, adding: “If he’s not going to be charged, that’s up to them, but then I should not be charged.”
Trump’s comments—his first public remarks on the report—came in a speech at the NRA’s Presidential Forum, held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The speech marks Trump’s first official campaign visit to the all-important 2024 swing state, which he lost by about 80,000 votes in 2020. (Trump lied about winning the state in his speech.)
The GOP frontrunner currently faces 40 felony charges in Florida for allegedly refusing to return classified documents that he stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence. Throughout this campaign season, Trump has, without evidence, described the prosecution, which is set to go to trial in May, as a politically motivated witch-hunt seeking to undercut his electoral chances.
Earlier this month, lawyers in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office, which is prosecuting the documents case, accused Trump of painting an “inaccurate and distorted picture” of the prosecution based on “speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.”
In his Friday speech, Trump floated the unsupported claim that he had cooperated “with the very hostile and unfriendly feds” in his classified documents case “far more than Biden did,” alleging that the Justice Department is “trying desperately to spin the Biden document disaster into an ‘Oh, but wasn’t Trump worse?’ No, no, no. Trump was peanuts by comparison.”
The former president, of course, neglected to mention that the Hur report explicitly drew the opposite conclusion. The special counsel argued that Trump allegedly tried to stymie the investigation by directing people around him “to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.” At the same time, Biden, by contrast, “turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”
Trump also alighted on the report’s comments about the president’s mental fitness after Hur declined to recommend charges because a jury would likely perceive Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Pontificating on the president’s cognitive skills, Trump claimed Biden retained classified documents when “he was mentally a little better than he is right now.” He added that he blamed Democrats around Biden—and not Biden himself—for the criminal cases currently unfolding against him “because I don’t think [Biden] knows he’s alive.”
Trump’s comments on the Hur report were just one of many attack lines trotted out against Biden and the Democrats Friday. In a rambly 70-minute speech, the former president claimed that the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border would help him win over “African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and all unions” from the Democratic Party, and predicted a “100% chance of a terrorist attack” if Biden wins in November.
He also offered chum to lure his NRA audience, promising to roll back Biden-era gun regulations so that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.” “Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day,” Trump told the crowd, which burst into cheers.