Former President Joe “Auto Pen” Biden’s weaponized FBI seemed to place great importance on the proper handling of classified documents when it raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. It was so important that the FBI spent nine hours searching President Donald Trump’s Florida home, meticulously rifling through even Melania Trump’s clothing and arranging documents marked “secret” on the floor to create a damning photo op, even though Trump had the power when president to declassify the documents.
It was obviously politically motivated. Otherwise, the FBI would have been just as alarmed when it later learned Biden had classified documents in his Delaware garage. The Department of Justice (DOJ) did a little investigation, wrote a report, and decided, “No criminal charges are warranted” for Biden.
Yet for Trump, Biden’s weaponized DOJ seized boxes of documents and, just in time for the presidential election, indicted Trump and dragged him through a year in court before dismissing the case in July 2024. After Trump took office again in 2025, the boxes of documents were returned to him.
But this week, we discovered the FBI has been appallingly sloppy with thousands of classified FBI records that were produced on the taxpayer’s dime and are of interest to the public. Documents related to the FBI’s involvement in former President Barack Obama’s Russia collusion hoax. Documents by the thousands, hidden in a secret FBI room and stuffed in burn bags, meaning they were marked for destruction. According to Fox News Digital, FBI Director Kash Patel has given the documents to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Stack that on top of the June revelation that the FBI agents hid federal documents within the FBI’s computer system by coding them “Prohibited Access,” thereby making them invisible in searches. A keyword search for these hidden documents in the FBI’s computer system would not be enough to find them. The only people who could access them would be someone who knew of their existence.
It seems that in the hands of Biden’s FBI, no document was safe from the whim of agents eschewing public transparency.
Documents are safer under Trump’s care at Mar-a-Lago. Trump has made no indications that he intends to destroy federal records. It is clear from the indictment that Trump never hid the fact that he had the documents, and now that the election is over, no one seems bothered that Trump has the documents again.
By contrast, the FBI hid and destroyed documents, and when asked to provide documents for investigations, the FBI has been uncooperative.
There are valid reasons to keep certain documents hidden. For example, if making a document public causes a threat to national security, outs undercover law enforcement, or if the information could destroy an ongoing investigation.
But the FBI and other DOJ agencies have abused their authority, hiding information that should have been public. The measure for hiding a document should not be, “Will this kill my career if it gets out?” or “What are the political implications of this information being made public?”
Good, bad, or ugly, it is always right to speak the truth, and it is the people’s right to understand all aspects of the government it funds. The criteria to classify a document as secret must err on the side of keeping the public informed. In truth, many of the documents being released in recent weeks — deep state documents related to rigging the U.S. election — do not meet the standard for classified materials. They were hidden only because they were embarrassing, and possibly criminal.
Devin Nunes, chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, recently told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures that he believes the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago because they were looking for the recently declassified intelligence community assessment that details the Obama Administration’s apparent effort to sabotage Trump’s first term as president with the bogus Russia collusion narrative.
“Why was there a raid at Mar-a-Lago? What led to that raid? What led to the appointment of that special counsel? What the hell were they doing at Mar-a-Lago? What were they looking for? This was an unprecedented act in U.S. history, where the Department of Justice raids a former president’s home,” Nunes said. “Whatever scheme they had cooked up, whatever they were looking for, they didn’t find clearly, but that was to try to stop President Trump from being reelected.”
The magnitude of a scandal is directly related to how vigorously someone hides evidence of wrongdoing. In the case of the FBI, with its infinite power to hide things as classified, prohibited access, or by simply deleting evidence, the document scandal is quite real, and much more important than the phony scandal of the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
