NBC’s Chuck Todd and Rep. Jim Jordan Spar About “Double Standard” In Documents Debacle

On Sunday morning’s “Meet The Press,” host Chuck Todd had a fiery debate with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) about the “double standard” in how the document discoveries were handled for former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

 “The FBI raided the home of a former president 91 days before an election, took the phone of a sitting member of Congress, and on and on,” Jordan said, adding that the agency has been “weaponized.”

“You keep talking about this raid with Donald Trump,” Todd said, “The amount of time–there was nine months between the initial action the Archives made for a request of documents before they even turned it over to the Justice Department. The subpoena was issued 60 days before they actually executed the subpoena.”

“And more importantly,” Todd continued, “the only time the public found out about it is because Donald Trump told the public about it…You paint it as a picture of the FBI did this, this and this within hours of each other, when it was actually a year and a half of Donald Trump not complying with any of the requests from National Archives. This is not some sort of proof that somehow they’ve been ‘weaponized’ and playing politics.”

“They raided Trump’s home, they haven’t raided Biden’s home,” Jordan said.

“Because Biden didn’t defy a subpoena, Congressman,” Todd replied.

The Ohio Congressman Jordan also compared how pictures of Trump’s scattered documents were taken whereas no pictures of Biden’s documents have been released. 

He also tried to emphasize the difference in security around how both leaders’ documents had been stored, saying that Trump had documents “locked in a secret room with secret service protecting them,” while President Biden had documents “in his garage and in a think tank funded by the Chinese.”

Todd then asked: “You’re worried about the Chinese and Hunter Biden. Are you worried about the Chinese and Donald Trump?” Jordan said he wasn’t, before saying that the issue was “equal treatment under the law.” 

Todd disagreed, saying: “The issue is you do not seem to ever see the same conspiratorial problems when it’s a Republican.”

Jordan’s comments echo weeks of concerns from the GOP, calling it a “double standard” in treatment, a “two-tiered justice system,” and accusations that Biden’s think tank, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was funded by the Chinese government. (These claims were debunked by a spokesperson for the University of Pennsylvania: “The assertion that the Penn Biden Center received $54 million from China is total nonsense.”)

The fiery debate also came days after classified documents were also discovered at the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence.