In 2016, James Comey announced that he would not prosecute Hillary Clinton for being “extremely careless” with classified information. Despite the over 30,000 emails that she deleted, the “BleachBit” that she used to erase her hard drives, the personal server she used to circumnavigate State Department security, and the numerous classified documents that were found in her unclassified emails, Comey decided that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her.

If you did this, you would be in jail.

Worse, four State Department employees, including an Ambassador, died at Benghazi while she was Secretary of State.

Later, Clinton glibly replied, “What difference at this point does it make?”

Also in 2016, the Mainstream Media fed the fallacious conspiracy that Trump colluded with Russia. Thousands of news articles flamed these claims, leading to an impeachment.

In 2023, the Columbia Journalism Review, the most prestigious fact checker in the US, produced a 26,000 word document that showed that the entire “Russia Gate” conspiracy was nothing but a lie. The report, written by a NY Times Pulitzer Prize investigative reporter, concluded that the misinformation that the Media spread was a collection of unsourced fabrications cut and pasted together by a former British spy, paid for by the Hillary Clinton Campaign. The report further noted that the FBI helped the Media “substantiate” the fiction numerous times.

Of course, the Media and the FBI ignored the report, never admitting their biased mistakes.

In 2020, just months before the presidential election, the FBI convinced Facebook to squelch the Hunter Biden laptop story as disinformation, when, in fact, it really was his laptop. Twitter banned the story altogether.

Biden was elected a few months later, without anyone knowing about the laptop.

Polls have later shown that 79 percent of Americans think that “truthful reporting” on the laptop would have changed the results of the election.

In 2021, the FBI targeted parents who attended School Board meetings as “extremist hate organizations” that acted with “threats and acts of violence” that might be “domestic terrorism.” None of these claims were substantiated. Yet the DOJ told the FBI to run with it anyway, with a “series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct” against these parents.

Two years later, the Attorney General admitted that he based this unconstitutional surveillance on what he, “read in the newspapers.”

In 2023, the FBI admitted to a leaked memo that showed they were targeting “traditional Catholics” as a “far-right nationalist movement”. They further admitted to asking priests to spy on their parishioners.

Also in 2023, the FBI admitted to targeting people who buy Bibles as “violent extremists”. The FBI tasked the Department of Treasury to ask banks to spy on their customers who bought Bibles, completely ignoring the Constitution.

No wonder 63 percent of Americans distrust the FBI, a sad commentary on the once-revered institution.

Overall trust in the Federal government has plummeted from 77 percent in 1964 to a new low of just 16 percent today.

Just this week, the DOJ announced that they found numerous instances of criminal wrongdoing of Biden concerning dozens of boxes of classified documents lying all over his home for decades. The investigation reported that he “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials”, which is a crime. Biden even admitted to sharing classified documents with his ghost writer, which is a worse crime.

If you did this, you would be in jail. There are lots of examples of military personnel who were imprisoned for accidentally mishandling a few classified documents, much less “willfully” hiding hundreds.

But, like James Comey, the DOJ decided not to prosecute Biden, saying he was “an elderly man with a poor memory” with “diminished faculties.”

So…Joe Biden is too mentally incompetent to stand trial, yet he’s fit to be president?

Maybe that’s why a recent poll found that 86 percent of Americans thinks that Biden is too old to be president. That includes 91 percent of Independents and 73 percent of Democrats.

Even more troubling, is the “two-tiered” system of justice of the Dept. of Justice and FBI.

Our time-honored symbol of justice is a blind-folded woman who decides cases solely on the merits: without ever knowing the identity of those accused.

Today, the DOJ is all about identity, weaponizing their power to reward friends and punish enemies.

You’d expect such behavior in a Banana Republic…or perhaps, Russia.

Yet, that’s what we find in Biden’s America.

Dave Belton is a former state representative for District 112, which includes portions of Morgan and Newton counties.