Sen. Dan Sullivan has broken with GOP Senate leaders in blasting the recently unsealed indictment against former President Donald Trump.
Unsealed on Friday, the 37-count federal indictment claims Trump misled federal investigators in order to retain sensitive documents, which they claim Trump knew were still classified.
Trump said he is “totally innocent,” and calls the case against him a “boxes hoax,” that reveals election interference and corruption at the highest levels of federal government. Trump sees the indictment as a last gasp effort to try and stop him from regaining the White House in 2024.
Sullivan pointed out glaring double standard by which the Justice Department and the FBI are applying the law.
“The worst thing for our country is for Americans to start to believe that the Justice Department and FBI provide two tiers of justice, and that the indictment of a former president and current candidate for the White House is unprecedented and will almost certainly do lasting damage to our polarized nation,” he said in a prepared statement. “The American people know that for years Joe Biden stored classified documents in his garage and that Hillary Clinton mishandled classified emails stored on her private server in her home. But with this Justice Department there seems to be far more interest in pursuing former President Trump – President Biden’s chief political rival – than others.”
Sullivan said the indictment further erodes trust in the rule of law.
“Equality before the law is a fundamental tenet of our republic,” he added. “The Biden administration is shoving our country into dangerous territory that is eroding trust in critical institutions of our government.”
Conservatives have pointed out that the Biden administration’s use of law enforcement agencies to attack Trump amount to a weaponization of government for political purposes.
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“After the regime weaponized a bogus dossier, spied on his campaign, hamstrung his policy, impeached him, impeached him again, defamed him as a racist Nazi, made his supporters fear isolation and employment retribution, lied about him in every way imaginable on every news station and in every paper every day, and rigged elections against him, they’re finally taking him down with some paperwork,” wrote Kylee Griswold from The Federalist. “Speak of the devil, ignore that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and Barack Obama all had their own “documents disputes” — some more serious than Trump’s — without facing any criminal charges. And that the whole Mar-a-Lago fiasco, which involved the FBI sending dozens of plainclothes agents to raid the former’s president’s estate and dig through his wife’s closet, started when a disgruntled, backbench National Archives bureaucrat tattled because he didn’t like the look of Trump’s banker box.”
The next step in this case will occur on Tuesday, when Trump is arraigned before a U.S. District Court judge to enter a formal “not guilty” plea to the charges leveled against him. At that point, the legal process will include establishing a timeline for key court dates and laying out the details of the lengthy discovery phase. The actual trial isn’t expected to begin until next spring, just months before what promises to be a hotly contested presidential election.
