Fox News Anchor Asks Why Feds Didn’t Raid Documents Biden Voluntarily Returned

A Fox News anchor asked why the FBI did not raid President Joe Biden just like they did when they executed their search warrant to retrieve classified documents Donald Trump was hoarding at Mar-a-Lago.

Outnumbered on Tuesday covered news that the Justice Department initiated a review after Biden’s attorneys found a stash of classified documents in an office Biden used when he was vice president to Barack Obama. The documents were discovered while Biden’s attorneys were closing out the office, and the White House said they alerted the National Archives before turning the papers over the next day. The counsel’s office said they have since been cooperating with the Archives.

Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asked if there will be depositions for the contents of the material, and should those documents have been declassified before they wound up in Biden’s office.

“Trump could do that with the documents found at his home in Mar-a-Lago,” Faulkner said. “The vice president couldn’t do that. Biden, I don’t think he can do it now, but that’s a question I would ask too. Would he cover his tracks now?”

Brief reminder: Trump’s documents were not declassified when he improperly took them to Mar-a-Lago. Among the ex-president’s many attempts to dismiss the investigation into his hoarding of the documents, he has been mocked over his attempts to claim he could declassify with merely a thought.

Fox News host Emily Compagno ripped into the “apologist media” for pointing out the differences between the two cases. Brian Kilmeade called for an investigation on where else Biden could have kept classified documents, before criticizing both Biden and Trump for their handling of documents:

What other information do you have?…Donald Trump said I have paperwork. Donald Trump was negotiating on the other side, I don’t think was smart for Donald Trump to take it to Mar-a-Lago. I don’t think it was smart to leave it there and not just hand over everything right away, especially because you know he’s not into reading it anyway, except for a few momentums. And by the way, it was locked in Mar-a-Lago, and there was Secret Service there. There was no Secret Service at the Penn Building in Washington.

Martha MacCallum argued that regardless of the distinctions between the cases, “either it’s legal, or it’s illegal…Two wrongs do not make a right.”

“So is there gonna be a special prosecutor for this?” Kilmeade asked.

“Well, they have to treat them equally,” MacCallum answered.

“Are they gonna do a raid on the Biden residence?” Faulkner asked.

What no one pointed out in the segment is that the Mar-a-Lago raid occurred after Trump spent months resisting subpoenaed demands that he return the hundreds of classified documents he improperly took when he left office. Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed he did not have classified documents in his possession, alarming officials and prompting the Justice Department to take drastic action to retrieve those documents.

By contrast — as Carley Shimkus and Karl Rove previously pointed out on Fox News — Biden’s team found a much smaller number of classified documents in an office and turned them over immediately. It is currently unknown how the documents came to be in Biden’s old office, though a “raid” on Biden is unlikely if he continues to cooperate with the DOJ review.

Watch the rest of the conversation above, via Fox News.