Both sides now

Well this is just extremely unhelpful:

Special counsel Robert Hur released a searing report Thursday that concluded President Joe Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified military and national security information but recommended he not face charges after a year long investigation into his handling of classified documents.

“We concluded that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Hur concluded. “We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.”

Hur wrote that Biden believed he was allowed to keep the classified information that was contained in his personal notebooks, concluding that prosecutors wouldn’t be able to prove Biden intended to break the law at trial.

One of the reasons Hur chose not to bring charges, according to the report, was that it would be difficult to prosecute Biden, who could appear to a jury as sympathetic.

Biden also cooperated with the investigation and returned the classified documents once they were discovered, Hur wrote — noting the significant differences between this case and the charges against former President Donald Trump.

The special counsel investigation found that Biden knew about the classified documents in his home as far back as 2017, when he was no longer vice president, and that he shared some of the information with the ghostwriter for his memoir published that year.

The public release of the 345-page report marks the conclusion of Hur’s investigation.

Two things:

(1) This kind of sloppiness is not OK. It’s the kind of thing that would get an ordinary executive branch employee fired, if not prosecuted. It represents the kind of cavalier attitude that way too many high status people have toward The Rules, as in they really don’t apply to me, at least not literally because come on I wasn’t doing anything bad with the info etc. etc.

(2) There’s of course a world of difference between this and what Trump did, which was 100 times worse.

But it’s on the same continuum of insouciance, and guess what, the Ariana Grande theory of politics says this is going to come out as “Both Trump and Biden illegally took classified documents with them when they left office.” And that’s the good version. The bad version is that Trump was prosecuted/persecuted by the Deep State as a result while Biden got a pass for “exactly the same thing.”

Also, thanks a lot Merrick Garland, for this and so many other contributions to our present circumstances.