Good Thursday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill's Top Opinions.
FBI agents executed a search warrant at former President Trump's Florida home this week, seizing roughly a dozen boxes of material.
The warrant indicated that the Justice Department is investigating possible violations of laws related to the Presidential Records Act and the handling of classified material. The law requires that documents related to a president's duties be preserved for retention by the National Archives and Records Administration.
George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley writes that the raid is a "moment in need of sobering reality checks on what it does and does not mean."
Turley notes that the FBI has a "documented history of bias against Trump…including prior falsification or misrepresentations used to facilitate the Russia conspiracy investigation."
Turley believes "the Justice Department has an added burden to show this raid was a step toward actual criminal prosecution and not just a political indemnification."
Harvard University Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz believes Justice should have subpoenaed the documents it was seeking, instead of exercising a search warrant and conducting a dramatic raid.
What's more, Justice and the FBI, he writes, "must explain why a different standard appears to have been applied to Trump than to Democrats who were similarly accused of violating the Presidential Records Act, such as Hillary Clinton and Sandy Berger, national security advisor under President Clinton.
Like Turley, Dershowitz thinks, "The burden of proof is now on the Justice Department and the FBI to justify what appears to be unequal justice."
Former Federal Prosecutor James Zirin asks a larger legal question — one that no doubt is on many people's minds: Could Trump be disqualified from running for office again if he's found guilty of removing, concealing or destroying documents?
We may soon find out more. Breaking this afternoon, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department is seeking to unseal the search warrant used by the FBI to raid Trump's home.
And while some observers are suggesting that the investigations against Trump could backfire and end up benefiting the former president, Steve Israel is having none of it.
"Forget the optics," the former N.Y. congressman writes about the possibility of Trump gaining sympathy for what could be seen as a political attack that arouses the sympathies of swing voters.
"Once we begin making exceptions based on electoral optics, no matter how worthy they may seem, we have entered the realm where both law and justice become soft, spongy and as credible and transient as the most recent poll."
Read Israel's column here.
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