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Donald Trump would have already been "arrested" and "indicted" if not for being the former president, according to former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner.
During his Justice Matters podcast on Saturday, Kirschner blasted what he views as an unequal treatment of Trump in the Department of Justice's (DOJ) probe into whether he illegally took classified documents when he vacated the White House last year.
Trump has faced the DOJ investigation for months after FBI agents in August raided his Mar-a-Lago property and seized the documents, which may have included another country's nuclear secrets. Trump has maintained his innocence, however, saying that he could declassify the documents without going through a former declassification process.
On Friday, DOJ prosecutors alleged that Trump is still holding onto some of the classified documents, defying orders to produce every single one he allegedly removed from the White House. They requested a federal judge to hold the ex-president in contempt over the documents, according to a Washington Post report.
However, U.S. Judge Beryl Howell on Friday declined to do that, delivering a rare win for Trump's legal team after several losses in various investigations, according to the Post. The decision allows Trump's team to avoid paying daily fines until he fully complies with the subpoenas.
Kirschner, a Trump critic, defended Howell for not holding the former president in contempt, interpreting her decision as calling the DOJ to "do its job." Instead, he blasted the department for allegedly handling Trump differently than they would any other private citizen.
"What they should have done was get a search warrant promptly, get all of the documents they could by searching Donald Trump's properties. Arrest the perpetrator, Donald Trump. Continue to investigate. And then get supplemental search warrants and continue to try to collect up what Donald Trump has stolen," he said.
Kirschner accused the DOJ of putting Trump "slightly above the law," leaving them in an investigative "quagmire."
He also questioned its decision to request Judge Howell to force Trump's attorneys to appoint a records custodian to certify that he has produced all of the alleged stolen documents, saying this is "not the way criminal investigations work."
"DOJ thus far has been unwilling to do what it would have done had anyone else stolen those classified documents from the federal government," Kirschner added. "They would have arrested them, and indicted them and done supplemental search warrants to figure out where the rest of the documents are."
Meanwhile, after additional classified documents were found at a storage unit connected to Trump, the former president wrote in a recent Truth Social post that the FBI's seizing of the original documents was "illegal," calling on everything to be "returned at once."
Newsweek reached out to Trump's office for comment.
About the writer
Andrew Stanton is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in Maine. His role is reporting on U.S. politics and social issues. ... Read more