The revelation that Joe Biden mishandled classified or presidential records after his term as vice president ended in 2017 will make it "close to impossible" for the Justice Department to prosecute former President Donald Trump for similar actions, John Bolton told Newsmax on Tuesday.
The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren" that although the cases between Biden and Trump might be different, the public perception will benefit Trump in the long run.
"Trump may be the luckiest person to hold classified documents unlawfully in the entire history of the United States," said Bolton, who has been sparring with Trump since he left as the former president's national security advisor in 2019.
"In affecting the Justice Department's decision whether to prosecute Trump politically, this seems to me to make it close to impossible. It doesn't matter what the facts are on Trump now; in the public mind, people will say, 'Biden had classified documents. Trump had classified documents. You have to treat them exactly alike.'"
The Justice Department has been investigating the retention of about 300 presidential documents that were marked as classified and were recovered from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate by an FBI search warrant. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to investigate, and a federal grand jury has been impaneled.
On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, requested U.S. intelligence to conduct a "damage assessment" of the documents found in a closet at the Penn Biden Center, where Biden had an office after leaving as vice president and before launching his 2020 presidential bid.
Bolton said he sees differences between the cases, but those differences might get lost in the fog of public perception.
"We don't know what's in the [Biden] documents. We don't know if there are more documents," Bolton said. "The one difference that is important is, that if we believe what Biden's attorneys are saying, when they found the documents, [and] as promptly as possible, they turned him over to the [National Archives]. … Whereas Trump fought the archives and fought the Justice Department, and there is a statute that says if the federal government asks you to turn over classified documents, and you refuse or you deny you have them and it turns out you do, that's a separate offense from just having them in the first place.
"So there are differences here that that's for sure, but I think it's going to get lost in the fog."
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