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After news of the discovery of classified documents in President Joe Biden's former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. broke this week, an outraged Donald Trump asked why the FBI had not raided the president's home like they did Mar-a-Lago last summer.
The answer is simple: the classified documents were discovered in November by Biden's lawyers, who promptly informed the National Archives of the finding, making any intervention by the FBI unnecessary.
But the crucial differences between the two cases haven't stopped Trump—and several conservative pundits and MAGA Republicans—from trying to draw a parallel between the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago and the discovery of classified documents at the Washington think tank, dragging the federal law enforcement agency into yet another political dispute.
"There is no obstruction or wilful mishandling of documents in Biden's case, so the FBI don't really feature. It was the Justice Department that made the call about the search," Jonathan Parker, senior lecturer in American Studies at Keele University, told Newsweek.
"That won't stop conspiracy-minded folks from seeing all of the federal government acting against them ... While there is little similarity to the cases, it's all about the optics," he added.
After the FBI raided Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in August, the former president lashed out against the agency, calling it "corrupt" and claiming that the search of the Florida resort was just an attempt to undermine him.
"The FBI has a long and unrelenting history of being corrupt. Just look back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover," Trump wrote on Truth Social after the raid, referring to the bureau's first director. "In the modern era, nothing has changed except that it has gotten far worse."
Parker believes that the discovery of classified documents in Biden's former office will very likely be used by Trump to support his claims that the FBI has been weaponized by Democrats against him.
"[The FBI] was certainly used as a political football by the former president, and it has not been used or attacked in the same way by the Biden administration," Parker said. "We have seen that the radical wing of the Republican party like to play out the myth of victimhood, particularly around claiming the election was stolen when all the evidence points to Trump as the only one attempting to steal it.
"Again, it is clear that it doesn't require facts or evidence for these claims to take hold in the party. They are certain to see this as a plot, and the new Congressional Republicans will no doubt vigorously pursue investigations around the issue," he continued.
"However, the politicization and damage to the FBI have already been done and this event only provides a new focus for further attacks that would have come regardless."
William Howell, a professor in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago, said that "there's a long, long history" of the FBI being instrumentalized in American politics.
"Ever since its founding, frankly, the FBI has on one hand tried to assert and insist upon its apolitical commitments—that it stands apart from politics and stands for the rule of law—and, on the other hand, it has been deployed either at the direction of presidents or at the direction of somebody like J. Edgar Hoover to attend to all kinds of patently political agendas," he told Newsweek.
"I actually don't think this is an especially exceptional moment in the longer history of the FBI, but here we go again," he said of the current situation.
"Trump wants to say that he's been treated unfairly at every turn and the problems are not his own behavior and his own sort of flouting of the rule of law and trampling over democratic norms and his incessant lying," Howell continued.
"The problem is that Democrats keep coming after him for patently political reasons, and they do so directly, but they also do so by leveraging the resources of the administrative state generally and of the intelligence agencies."
Newsweek reached out to the FBI and Trump's team for comment.
About the writer
Giulia Carbonaro is a Newsweek reporter based in London, U.K. Her focus is on the U.S. economy, housing market, property ... Read more