This week, a Rubicon was crossed: the former president of the United States and current Republican frontrunner for the presidential nomination, Donald Trump, was indicted on 37 federal felony charges relating to mishandling classified information and obstruction of justice. Needless to say, this has never happened before – and the precedent is horrifying. Trump himself campaigned in 2016 promising to “lock up” Hillary Clinton, but he certainly made no moves toward doing so once he entered the White House. But now, Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has done just that. And that means that, turnabout being fair play, future elections will carry the risk that the loser may find him or herself in the dock in retaliation.

The choice to indict Trump is particularly egregious given the fact that in 2016, Clinton wasn’t prosecuted for similar activity. Clinton, it should be remembered, held tens of thousands of emails on a private server, dozens of which were classified; James Comey, then head of the FBI admitted that there was a good shot that foreign sources could have accessed that server; the emails themselves were then destroyed by Clinton’s team, and her hard drive cleansed; nonetheless, months later, copies of those emails showed up on the laptop of moral derelict Anthony Weiner. Suffice it to say, Hillary undoubtedly engaged in both gross negligence in handling classified information and obstruction of justice. But Comey declined to prosecute, rewriting the law in order to reach that decision.

And then there is the Biden family. Allegations surrounding corruption within the Biden family continue to abound – and yet law enforcement seems peculiarly unconcerned with such allegations. According to Republican congresspeople, a whistleblower has now revealed that the Biden family received millions of dollars in exchange for favors done while Joe Biden was vice president. And yet Biden continues to receive not only the benefit of the doubt, but sycophantic treatment in the press. 

Americans remember the Hillary precedent and the Biden apathy as they see Trump in the dock this week. Trump certainly does.

Now, two things can be true at once: the allegations against Trump in the federal indictment are damning, if proved true. The indictment alleges not just that Trump took home classified documents – something done by public figures ranging from Joe Biden to Mike Pence to Hillary Clinton – but that he proceeded to tell his lawyers to attest that he had turned those documents back in, all the while shifting the documents themselves around to avoid his own lawyers knowing about them; that he bragged to journalists about classified documents in his possession while acknowledging that he had not in fact declassified them; that those documents did contain highly important national security information. Had Hillary been indicted in 2016, there would be little doubt about Trump’s indictment.

But she wasn’t. Which means that our justice system seems to be following the famous Latin American saying, “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” And that double standard will not hold. Which, presumably, is why Trump is already pledging to prosecute the Biden family should he be re-elected.

We’ve entered an ugly new phase in American political history. Trump should have known that his enemies were after him; only epic narcissism and foolishness can explain his behavior in relation to the boxes of documents that have now landed him in court. But such concerns are now secondary. The real question is whether one set of rules will ever again be applied by federal law enforcement – or whether the cycle of tit-for-tat will now enter into full force.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) said this week that “military-aged” Chinese nationals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army had been released into the U.S. by the Biden administration. 

Green made the comments during a Wednesday press conference announcing an investigation into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over “dereliction of duty” in regard to securing the southern border, which has seen record numbers of illegal crossings under President Joe Biden. 

“Secretary Mayorkas has put the national security of the United States at risk. Terrorists, suspected terrorists, and enemies of our nation have flooded across our borders,” Green said, before noting that there had been a “massive surge in Chinese nationals, many of whom are military-aged men, many with known ties to the PLA, ties to the CCP who have crossed our southern border and have just been released by Secretary Mayorkas into the United States.”

Green said that there were about 10,000 Chinese nationals who had been released into the U.S. so far this fiscal year. 

“We have no idea who these people are and it’s very likely, using Russia’s template of sending military personnel into Ukraine, China is doing the same in the United States,” Green said. 

Numbers released earlier this week show a massive number of migrants being detained from faraway countries, including Afghanistan and China. Border Patrol recorded just 450 encounters with migrants from China on the southern border in fiscal year 2021, and 2,176 in fiscal year 2022, but has so far encountered 9,854 in the first seven months of fiscal year 2023. 

During the press conference, Green also said that Mayorkas’ policies were to blame for the declining number of deportations even as illegal crossings increased. 

“These individuals typically possess no legitimate claim to asylum and under prior administrations – both Democrat and Republican – most would have been quickly deported. The difference now? Mayorkas and his policies,” he said. 

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Green said that emergency medical Medicaid spending “for illegal aliens more than doubled from FY20 to FY21, from around $3 billion to more than $7 billion.”

Republicans on the committee also pointed to the increasing fentanyl deaths in the U.S., some of which can be traced to drugs brought from Mexico, and the human trafficking taking place at the border. The committee also released a preliminary 55-page report on Mayorkas’ and Biden’s handling of the border. 

An estimated 1.5 million illegal migrant gotaways have been recorded since President Joe Biden took office in 2021. Meanwhile, 415,000 total gotaways were reported for 2018, 2019, and 2020 under the Trump administration.