The second half of Joe Biden’s presidential term has officially gotten off to an ignominious start.
Earlier last week, CBS News first broke the story that Biden had been storing classified documents, taken from his previous stint as vice president to Barack Obama, at the Chinese-funded Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement “think tank.” Those classified documents were first identified by Biden’s personal attorneys, CBS reported, on Nov. 2—a full six days before the midterm elections. Richard Sauber, Biden’s special counsel, claimed that the White House counsel’s office quickly notified the National Archives, which seized the documents posthaste.
That alone would be bad enough for a president who utterly excoriated former President Donald Trump in the aftermath of last August’s unprecedented predawn FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s palatial Palm Beach estate, due to Trump’s own classified document retention scandal. Biden openly wondered to CBS’ “60 Minutes” news program weeks after the FBI raid “how anyone could be that irresponsible.”
The galling hypocrisy from the Penn Biden Center incident would have been bad enough. But then, Joe Biden’s week got even worse.
Attorney General Merrick Garland responded to the news with the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Biden’s misdeeds. Garland, of course, had done the same for Trump almost two months prior, on Nov. 18. At least from Garland’s perspective, it seems both men are “irresponsible” enough and present sufficiently politically delicate positions so as to require a special counsel.
But obvious similarities—hence, Biden’s egregious hypocrisy stemming from his earlier attempt to seize a moral high ground—in these situations aside, there are some crucial differences. Those differences do not reflect well on the current White House occupant.
By far the most important difference is the constitutional distinction in the statuses of the two men at the center of this two-pronged saga: Donald Trump was president of the United States, while Joe Biden was merely vice president of the United States during the time that he absconded with classified documents.
The upshot is that, as this column argued after August’s Mar-a-Lago raid, “Trump had unilateral, plenary authority to declassify any document that he wanted to declassify—period.” Biden possessed no such similar power (he does now, as president). Furthermore, as the same August column argued, “all ex-presidents receive various taxpayer-funded accoutrements, among them a staff with security clearances and secure facilities (SCIFs) for the maintenance of classified records.” Biden, as an ex-vice president and not an ex-president, had no such niceties; he merely had a garage with a lock secure enough for his Corvette. What’s more, the Presidential Records Act also permits departing presidents to take personal copies of any of their records; the statute affords no such similar protection for departing vice presidents.
From a legal perspective, we will see where freshly minted special counsel Robert Hur goes with his investigation. And from a political perspective, the Biden administration’s astounding hypocrisy on this matter will surely face a blowback.
It is thoroughly unsurprising that the federal law enforcement apparatus and the corporate media buried the news of Biden’s malfeasance on the precipice of the midterm elections. The “Democrat-Media Complex,” as the late Andrew Breitbart called it, demands nothing less than such complicity.
There are many, many open questions here. Here’s hoping Special Counsel Hur can provide some answers.