Two things can be true at once about this week’s revelation that classified documents were found in a locked closet at a think tank office used by President Joe Biden after his vice presidency and before his election in 2020.
First, as former federal prosecutor Shan Wu argued here at The Daily Beast, the circumstances—such as we know of them so far—do seem legitimately different from those surrounding the recovery of classified documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property last year.
But second, the fact that this happened in early November, right before the midterms, and neither the White House nor the Department of Justice informed the public for more than two months…well, it’s pretty hard to see how that’s not blatantly corrupt.
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Not legally corrupt, perhaps. I don’t know of any statute the Biden administration violated in this delay. But unless there’s some enormous mitigating factor the White House has, for some mysterious reason, declined to explain, the moral corruption is glaring.
To all appearances, we’re just learning about this now because it might have been bad for Democrats in the election, undercutting their arguments about Trump’s unmatched dishonesty and threat to American democracy. And while that might explain why Biden didn’t sing the news from the rooftops, it’s no excuse for the semi-independent DOJ.
This looks an awful lot like an executive abuse of presidential power for political gain. It seems to be a pretty small one, but that’s exactly the behavior Democrats have argued—over and over for the better part of a decade now—is so disqualifying in Trump.
This story is why people hate politics.
It’s tawdry and off-putting—one caveat and “to be sure” and “but the other side” after another.
And the worst of it is that, in broad strokes, those claims and qualifications will be right: What Trump did is worse, likely uniquely bad on the scale of modern presidential document security practices (a topic to which, it is well-known, every American voter thrills).
And both sides are feckless and at least misleading if not outright deceptive. There is no shining city on a hill here. There is no brave and noble stand. There’s not even the possibility of skipping over the coming week or more of perfunctory statements and online grandstanding and reflexive partisan positioning—even though you or I or any 8-year-old could game out all the moves right now with perfect accuracy.
First come the bare facts, or at least a portion of them. Already we know there are differences of quantity, storage security, and, most important, the process by which the documents were recovered. Biden’s lawyers reported and surrendered them immediately on discovery. Trump’s papers went back to Washington only after “more than a year of requests, negotiations, grand jury subpoenas, and meetings between Trump’s representatives, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Justice Department that culminated in a criminal search warrant being executed on Trump’s home,” in Wu’s summary.
But then come the inevitable recriminations. Trump himself is, as ever, Johnny-on-the-spot, coyly asking when the FBI would execute a search warrant on Biden’s home and noting the suspect timing of this week’s belated announcement.
From there, naturally, he went on to claim that the University of Pennsylvania-affiliated think tank where Biden had his office is funded by China (the think tank has categorically denied this, though the broader university has received donations from people in China, as have other Ivy League schools) and, therefore, that Biden has shared U.S. secrets with Beijing.
Is it even a post-2016 news cycle if you don’t get around to postulating some light treason?
Other Republicans have already followed suit, calling for federal investigations of all kinds. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) threw in an impeachment demand for good measure. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) declared the entire Biden family compromised by the Chinese Communist Party. Biden knew about the documents in the closet “THE WHOLE TIME BUT STILL HAD HIS DOJ GOONS PERSECUTE TRUMP!!” howled Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) in a post Trump shared.
Where to next? My guess is we’ll see some Trump critics move from expostulation of the differences between these two circumstances to making a positive case for Biden’s delay in announcing the closet find: Actually, he was right to hide this so Republicans wouldn’t win the Senate—their behavior around this very story shows how damaging it would have been.
But even if this cycle concludes without spiraling to that depth, don’t take heart: We’ll have more stories like this again. We might even have this exact same story again—I couldn’t muster surprise for a classified documents cache held by any living ex-president, vice president, or, for that matter, Senate majority leader or speaker of the House—though we don’t need that symmetry to replicate how gross this story feels.
We need only the needling, mercenary, hateable politics we already have.
