A California Republican candidate for U.S. Senate has left many online angry and eye-rolling after attempting to draw a nonsensical comparison between former Republican President Donald Trump and former Democratic President Barack Obama.
Like nearly all Republicans, Mark Meuser, who is running for Senate against Democratic incumbent Alex Padilla, is outraged that the FBI searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence due to his removal of White House documents, some of which may be classified.
Republicans are equally incensed that the FBI has also seized Republican Pennsylvania House member Scott Perry's cellphone because of his involvement in an attempt to overturn his state's 2020 election results.
The GOP has been working overtime to cast both events as politically motivated persecution and fascistic government overreach, despite the fact that, you know, it really, *really* looks like both men committed actual crimes.
Of course, that doesn't matter to most Republicans, so Meuser took to Twitter to suggest a supposed double standard, wondering how Democrats would feel if the GOP did the same to Obama and Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Riiiight.
Meuser wrote:
"Imagine the backlash if while he was in office, Trump had Obama's home raided and AOC’s phone seized."
"Are you tired of the double standard?"
The problem is, of course, there is no double standard, since Obama and AOC are not and never have been suspected of committing crimes.
The same cannot be said of Trump and Perry. In Trump's case, the search of his home was signed off on by an as yet unnamed federal judge who would have had to conclude that substantial evidence of a crime existed to justify the search.
Should the search uncover said evidence, Trump could be charged with misdemeanor mishandling of classified information, much like General David Petraeus was in 2015.
Similarly, the seizure of Perry's phone was also approved by a judge because of evidence he was part of a scheme to establish a slate of so-called "alternative" Trump electors from Pennsylvania despite the fact that Joe Biden was certified as the winner of the state in the 2020 election.
Given that Meuser's tweet is basically the definition of a false equivalency, it didn't go over very well on Twitter.
Meuser is widely expected to lose by a landslide to Padilla in November after advancing to the general election with just 14% of the primary vote.
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