GOP lawmaker confronted by CNN for ‘only caring about’ Biden and not Trump classified documents

James Comer is set to chair House’s prime investigative committee

Rep James Comer was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday whether he and other Republicans were holding Joe Biden to a double standard after refusing to criticise former president Donald Trump for his stash of classified material at Mar-a-Lago.

The question came as the GOP, including Mr Comer, have vowed to investigate whether Mr Biden mishandled classified materials as they take power in the House. Mr Comer is set to lead at least some of that effort as the incoming chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the House’s main investigative body.

He and other Republicans have faced questions about their reactions to the Biden saga given that the discovered stash of documents at Mr Biden’s DC think tank and Wilmington abode currently numbers far fewer in total than the trove obtained by the FBI when it raided Mr Trump’s home last September.

Republicans have claimed, meanwhile, that it is actually the Justice Department which is guilty of holding someone to a double standard: former president Donald Trump.

Mr Comer was asked about the obvious disrepancy in the tenor of the GOP’s reaction to the Biden story versus the rage directed at the Justice Department following the raid of Mar-a-Lago.

“Do you only care about documents being mishandled when Democrats do the mishandling?” Tapper asked the congressman.

“Absolutely not,” Mr Comer returned.

Mr Trump has continued to rage against the Department of Justice as he remains the target of not only the investigation into his handling of classified documents and other presidential records but is also thought to be at the centre of the agency’s ongoing probe into January 6 and the effort to overturn the 2020 election. That investigation has taken new focus on the Trump White House over the past year while hundreds of individual participants in the attack have already been charged and convicted.

A joint memo from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security last year indicated that Mr Trump’s very public fury was having real-life consequences for FBI and other federal agents in the field; in Ohio, a man even was killed after attempting to forcibly enter and FBI building and firing shots.