When Joe Biden sat down with PBS’ Judy Woodruff, you knew at least one of the topics covered would be the classified document fiasco that’s engulfed his White House. Biden kept state secrets unsecured at multiple locations, including his Wilmington home. Documents were also found in the garage of that residence. For months, Biden and the Democrats lectured the country about handling sensitive materials in the aftermath of the ransacking of Mar-a-Lago by federal agents in August of 2022—a move that drew criticism that it was politically motivated. With Biden’s classified document sweepstakes, there is zero chance anything happens to Trump other than the former president smiling with glee as his political enemies must eat mountains of crow about how Biden and his team were ace guardians of such secrets.
And nothing will happen to Biden either now as a sitting president or when he leaves office. The Department of Justice has a special counsel investigating these breaches, but it’s been a middling effort. There are troves of files stored at the University of Delaware; no federal agents are currently sifting through them. The DOJ was ‘hell on wheels’ with Trump regarding classified materials. Biden’s breaches have been met with reservations, and that’s being generous. Law professor Jonathan Turley posited that the DOJ was intentionally sabotaging the effort, as the special counsel’s staff appeared to be taking the words of Biden’s private lawyers as gospel regarding the chain of custody. If anything, the FBI should be more concerned because, unlike Trump, we don’t know if there are other outstanding classified materials that Biden left behind.
The president also found a new scapegoat regarding his classified document scandal: the office packers. He threw them under the bus while also marginalizing the severity of his recklessness. He said this was merely a “stray papers” case and that the office packing crew didn’t do their due diligence. Biden offered the equivalent of a ‘bad Yelp review’ as a presidential defense for his incompetence (via Politico):
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President Joe Biden shifted some blame for his document-related troubles to the people who packed his offices when asked Wednesday about the discovery of classified materials in his possession.
“What was not done well is, as they packed up my offices to move them, they didn’t do the kind of job that should’ve been done, to go thoroughly through every piece of literature that’s there,” Biden told Judy Woodruff on PBS’s “NewsHour.”
Biden did not give any additional specifics about the packing of the material in question. The president has been mostly tight-lipped about the materials taken from his personal office and homes, citing an ongoing Justice Department investigation; his comment Wednesday marked one of his first public statements on what may have gone wrong as the materials were handled.
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“The best of my knowledge, the kind of things they [investigators] picked up are things that — from 1974, stray papers. There may be something else, I don’t know,” Biden said of the investigators that looked for materials in his possession. 1974 was Biden’s second year in the U.S. Senate, and he didn’t explain what type of material from that year he might have had in his possession.
Relying on Biden’s memory is akin to trusting someone who has consumed two bottles of Maker’s Mark with the car keys—you don’t do it. It’s the definition of unreliable, and like most politicians, Biden refused to apologize for his gross negligence regarding safeguarding classified materials.
The ‘this wouldn’t have happened if the shippers did their job’ isn’t a legitimate response. The buck stops with you, kid. This is all your fault, old man.
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