Kent's double standard in documents case

Congressional candidate joins wrongheaded 'weaponization' chorus

If any congressional candidate should know the importance of protecting the nation’s intelligence secrets, it should be Joe Kent.

Yet the former Green Beret has joined the GOP’s two-faced claims about the “weaponization” of the justice system in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump.

Kent, a Clark County Republican, is taking his second shot at becoming Southwest Washington’s congressional representative, having lost narrowly to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in 2022.

In a Facebook post last week, Kent called the 37-count indictment against Trump “the full weaponization of our federal law enforcement.”

“We are in a banana republic. … I want to rein-in our weaponized system and bring back our constitutional republic. ... Keep your powder dry and buckle up,” Kent told his Facebook audience.  

Kent, who said he had security clearance to see classified documents while in the military, asserted that he would feel the same way no matter who was the target of the investigation (more on that later).The President can declassify anything he wants, Kent said.

This is bold, politically driven balderdash that refuses to believe that Trump has flaws.

For starters, Kent is conveniently forgetting that mishandling intelligence secrets can compromise and endanger confidential sources, national defense and soldiers — like he was.

Trump has made no provable claim that he declassified the documents found at Mar-A-Lago, other than to state that absurdly he can just do it in his mind. 

Kent ignores the fact that Trump is accused of deliberately withholding and concealing his possession of intelligence papers from the National Archives. This is not a case of failing to understand the law. 

Obstruction of justice is the root of the charges here. It’s what makes Trump’s case so different from the disclosure that President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence also were found to have classified documents in their possession after leaving office. They returned them immediately upon discovery. 

Trump’s alleged response was typical: He wants to have his way regardless of what the law requires. Those documents were not his to do with as he pleased. They belong to the nation. They were marked classified because of national defense needs. His alleged obstruction was classic Trump resistance to the law.

Kent is forgetting that no one is above the law. That’s one of our most fundamental and sacred constitutional principles, and Kent and so many in the GOP are willing to trash it to protect Trump. So much for defending the Constitution.

Kent also doesn’t stop to ask whether the documents SHOULD have been declassified. Some are reportedly highly sensitive, involving invasion plans, assessments of nuclear capabilities and vulnerabilities and other materials that should be kept secret.

That Trump would store them in bathrooms, unprotected store rooms and other unsecured locations — and allegedly share the contents glibly with unauthorized people — would be reckless. No one knows why he was so adamant about keeping and sharing the papers. It seems that ego and braggadocio were at least part of the reason.

Trump’s own former attorney general, William Barr, recently said that even if half the allegations against Trump are true that the former president “is toast.” 

Barr has said he was “shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly.”

On Face the Nation, Barr said Trump “will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest, there’s no question about it… He’s like a… defiant nine-year-old kid who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it.”

Critics of the indictments should remember that the law does not require the prosecution to prove that Trump’s actions injured national security. We may never know if they did nor not. However, so much is at stake that just making top secret documents vulnerable to improper disclosure is a serious offense in itself.

Duplicitously, Kent said he’d feel the same way if another official were involved. So why, then, did Republicans demand that Hillary Clinton be prosecuted for using on unprotected email server? Is Kent telling us he would not go after President Joe Biden if he was the suspect in the documents case? Please…just consider… 

In hisFacebook post, Kent also joined Republican critics who assert that the FBI has “very damning evidence” that Biden took “at least” $5 million in bribes from a Ukrainian energy company — Burisma — while he was vice president during the Obama Administration. Kent accused the Justice Department of selective prosecution.

However, the allegation is based on an a secondhand report from an FBI confidential source, and the suspected original source himself is of dubious veracity. Alleged audio tapes have not shown up and may have been mythical to start with. The Trump Justice Department investigated it but dropped the case years ago. The report itself would never have be admissible in court because it is hearsay. 

This is all part of the allegations that arose about Hunter Biden’s role on the Burisma board that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, employed to try to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden in advance of the 2020 election. Marie Yovanovitch, the highly decorated former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, documents the whole sordid effort in her book Lessons from the Edge. This is all old stuff, but the GOP and Kent are counting on voters having political amnesia about it.

Kent is trying to tarnish Biden without a shred of reliable evidence — while he’s accusing the Justice Department of a weaponized prosecution of Trump, who was indicted by a federal grand jury. That panel based its action on damning evidence from many sources, including Trump’s former lawyers.

Talk about a double standard. This is playing defense with an aggressive offense, and it has no place in the administration of justice.

Trump supporters can’t see the many character flaws in their hero, and that’s a sign of brainwashing and idolatry. Trump is a false prophet. The sooner Kent and the rest of his supporters realize that, the better off our nation will be.