"Do you only care about classified documents being mishandled when Democrats do the mishandling?" Jake Tapper asked the congressman

Rep. James Comer, the Republican House’s incoming Oversight and Accountability Committee chair, failed to clearly articulate why the newly discovered classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s home and former personal office were worth the committee investigating but not the classified documents found at former president Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

“Do you only care about classified documents being mishandled when Democrats do the mishandling?” CNN host Jake Tapper pressed Comer on Sunday’s State of the Union.

CNN asks Comer, who's trying to make a big deal out of Biden's handling of classified documents, to explain a clip of him saying last November that investigating Trump's mishandling of classified docs is "not a priority" for him pic.twitter.com/jaGSbnC4Ew

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 15, 2023

The conversation began when Tapper asked Comer to react to the latest news regarding five additional classified documents that were discovered in Biden’s residence on Saturday.

“Well, my concern is that the special counsel was called for, but yet, hours after that, we still had the president’s personal attorneys, who have no security clearance, still rummaging around the president’s residence looking for things,” Comer said, adding that he believed the residence was “essentially a crime scene, so to speak.”

Comer’s answer, however, neglects the fact that the documents were discovered while White House lawyer Richard Sauber, who holds a security clearance, was supervising the search of Biden’s home and while Department of Justice officials were present, Sauber said in a statement on Saturday.

“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages. The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them,” the statement said.

Comer went on to say that he wants to subpoena visitor logs to Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home as well as the Biden Center for Diplomacy, the think tank where Biden’s personal office was located, “because this is the same type of investigation that the Democrats were so outraged and launched and demanded happened to President Trump.” But, Tapper noted, Comer never called for the release of the Mar-a-Lago visitor logs.

“So the hypocrisy here is great,” Comer said, adding, “We just want equal treatment.”

Tapper then confronted Comer with a clip of the congressman from Nov. 2022 where he stated that the investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents was “not a priority” for his committee.

“So, what do you say to viewers who don’t understand why President Biden’s documents seem like a big priority for you, but President Trump, who took hundreds more documents, did not comply with the subpoena, did not reach out to the National Archives or the Justice Department to say, hey, we found these documents, is not a priority?” Tapper asked. “Do you only care about classified documents being mishandled when Democrats do the mishandling?”

In his answer, Comer gave away his partisan motivation. “We don’t know exactly what Trump has vs. what Biden has,” he said. “At the end of the day, my biggest concern isn’t the declassified documents, to be honest with you. My concern is how there’s such a discrepancy in how former President Trump was treated by raiding Mar-a-Lago, by getting the security cameras, by taking pictures of documents on the floor, by going through Melania’s closet, vs. Joe Biden. They’re like OK, your personal lawyers who don’t have security clearance, yes, they can go through.”

Again, Tapper went through a long list of how Trump refused to cooperate with the Justice Department and lied about having the documents in his possession. “There’s a big difference in how President Biden and his team reacted and how President Trump and his team reacted,” Tapper said. “The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago because Trump—for more than a year—refused to turn over documents to the National Archives and the Justice Department, which was trying to get them back into secure hands. Trump and his lawyers lied about it. Trump lied about not having classified documents.”

Comer then fell back on Trump’s excuse. That he as president has powers to declassify any document he chooses. But Tapper noted that the Obama Administration granted the vice president to declassify documents as well.

TAPPER: Why ask for the visitor logs for Biden but not for Mar-a-Lago?

COMER: Well, we are doing the Biden family influence peddling investigation pic.twitter.com/kw7pLwUdF8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 15, 2023

“So, the average American who doesn’t really care whether the person you’re investigating has a D or an R next to their name might listen to this interview and think, I don’t have any problem with anything he’s investigating when it comes to Biden, but how come he’s not investigating all the same stuff when it comes to Trump?” Tapper said, noting, “There are questions about influence peddling when it comes to the Trump family. There’s questions about visitor logs when it comes to Mar-a-Lago. I mean, if you are going to be doing the Oversight and Accountability Committee, which you have renamed, for the American people, not just for Republicans, it would seem to me that all of it should be investigated.”

Comer then said he did intend to investigate “influence peddling with respect to the Trump administration” but then added, “But with respect to investigating President Trump, there have been so many investigations of President Trump, I don’t feel like we need to spend a whole lot of time investigating President Trump, because the Democrats have done that for the past six years. So, no one’s been investigated more than Donald Trump.”