Donald Trump Has Another Demand for Merrick Garland

Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel in the investigation of classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s possession, but that’s not the only thing Donald Trump wants to see.

“Merrick Garland has to immediately end Special Counsel investigation into anything related to me because I did everything right, and appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me,” Trump wrote on Truth Social less than an hour before Garland’s announcement.

On Thursday, Garland named Robert Hur, a veteran prosecutor who worked in the Trump administration as the U.S. attorney for Maryland, as the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s (DOJ) probe into the Biden documents.

This week, it was revealed that two batches of classified records from the Obama administration were found in Biden’s possession—one in his former office at a think tank in Washington and the other in the garage of his Delaware home. The first batch was discovered on November 2 and the second on December 20.

Biden and his attorneys have insisted they are “cooperating fully and completely” with the DOJ’s review. Speaking to reporters at the White House, the president said that the federal agency was “immediately notified” of the records and that department lawyers took custody of the documents.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on August 6, 2022, in Dallas. In the inset, Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks during a Thursday news conference, when he announced the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the probe into why classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s private office and home. Brandon Bell/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The recent developments surrounding Biden have drawn some comparisons to the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and the subsequent DOJ investigation into whether Trump mishandled presidential records upon leaving office. Federal agents seized more than 300 documents with classification markings from Trump’s home during the raid this past August.

Then, in November, Garland tapped former war crimes and public corruption prosecutor Jack Smith to lead his department’s two ongoing probes into Trump. The department is investigating the Mar-a-Lago documents as well as the former president’s actions related to the U.S. Capitol riot by his supporters on January 6, 2021.

On Thursday, Trump called for both investigations to be suspended, as well as the appointment of a special counsel in the case involving the Biden classified documents, which are from his time as vice president.

It is likely that when Garland appointed Hur, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, he intended to deter further criticism accusing his agency of being politically motivated against Trump and the Republican Party.

In his announcement, Garland described Hur’s “long and distinguished career as a prosecutor” and noted his supervision over some of the DOJ’s “more important national security, public corruption and other high-profile matters.”

“This appointment underscores for the public the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” the attorney general said.

Newsweek reached out to the DOJ for comment.