RUTHFULLY YOURS

“No reasonable prosecutor”: remember him? He’s back! No, not James “Higher Loyalty” Comey. He’s sitting in a corner somewhere counting his doubloons. But like some inky creatures of the deep, he emitted lots of spawn. They’re maturing now and taking after dear old dad.

Remember the original sitcom. Despite the best efforts of every one from the country’s “intelligence” chiefs to its fawning media, news emerged that Hillary Clinton had essentially run the State Department from an insecure server in her home.

On that server, it transpired, there were thousands of classified documents (along, of course, with yoga routines and plans for her daughter’s wedding). Presented with a subpoena to turn in the classified docs — there were some 30,000 of them. Hillary simply BleachBit the lot and dared Comey to do something about it.

He didn’t, of course. “No reasonable prosecutor,” you see would pursue such a case. Now James Comey’s spiritual heir has strode into the limelight. Meet Robert Hur, the very, extra-special, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious special counsel charged with looking into Joe Biden’s possession of classified (many “top secret” and above) in his den, basement, in his garage behind his vroom-vroom Corvette and in sundry other places in Washington’s Chinatown.

Yes, Hur said, Biden’s behavior presented “serious risks to national security.” But he still was declining to prosecute. Why? In part because the president of the United States — an “elderly man with a poor memory” — would be “sympathetic” to a jury.

“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur’s 350-page report admitted. “These materials included 1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and 2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods. FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home.”

Not to worry, though. Hur concluded that the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” I am not a lawyer, but isn’t that why we have trials, precisely to establish the guilt or innocence of a defendant?

Back when the news about Biden’s illegal possession of classified documents broke, I wrote a story in these pages pointing out “it’s different when Biden does it.” If you are Donald Trump and have classified documents in a locked room in a secure building protected by the Secret Service, you can expect a raid from the FBI and Jack Smith’s ghoulish salivating rictus to hover over you with subpoenas and the threat of jail or firing squad.

But then Donald Trump is a Republican. He is treated one way. Joe Biden is treated another way. In our increasingly Stalinist system, members of the nomenklatura are treated one way, everyone else is on his own.

In case the general point isn’t clear, another illustration of the way the world works just came over the news wire. The commentator Mark Steyn was sued years ago for defaming climate alarmist Michael Mann. The case took more than a decade to come to trial. Just moments ago, the jury came in with its verdict: Steyn and another journalist have both been found guilty of defamation and have been order to pay more than $1 million. When I tell you that the case was heard in Washington, DC and that Steyn is conservative while Mann is a progressive twit, you could already guess how the case was going to turn out. It’s amazing that anyone still believes in the American justice system.