Joining MSNBC on Monday morning, Biden Senior Advisor and Spokesperson for the White House Counsel's Office Ian Sams faced tougher than usual questioning from Morning Joe hosts and...Sams spiraled pretty quickly in what is just the latest instance of the White House failing to get in front of the president's classified document scandal.
Sams argued that President Biden and the White House Counsel's Office have given "unprecedented access" to the Justice Department to access and search "every room" of Biden's house in Wilmington, Delaware. But that access only came months after classified documents were first found in the then-former Vice President's D.C. Penn Biden Center office.
Why didn't the DOJ search Biden's home in Wilmington immediately after the first documents were found in November before the midterms? Why didn't they search Wilmington after a set of documents was found in Biden's garage? Why did it take the discovery of more than 10 items with classification markings in Wilmington for a DOJ search to take place there? And why hasn't the DOJ — as far as we know — searched Biden's other properties, such as his house in Rehoboth Beach where he spent the weekend?
Regardless of the facts, Sams insisted that Biden is handling the scandal in the "right way" and fully cooperating with the DOJ, despite the fact that Biden hid his breach of national security policy from the American people for months. "This is a president who believes in the rule of law," Sams argued, even though Biden has repeatedly found himself running afoul of the U.S. Constitution with his executive edicts.
Apparently, allowing a search of one of his homes months after improperly kept classified documents were first found, and many days after documents were first found in Wilmington, means Biden is "giving them [the DOJ] access to the information they need to conduct a thorough review," Sams claimed.
Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski pushed back against Sams by noting the a glaring disparity between the DOJ's handling of Biden's classified documents and Trump's.
Sams, who should have seen such a question coming, was apparently caught off-guard. "The president takes this very seriously," Sams replied, retreating to the line that has been said more times than can be counted any more. That's also a line, however, that is literally unbelievable and has been debunked repeatedly by Biden with each discovery of more classified documents.
"I understand the question," Sams claimed, but he continued to ignore it before trotting out another ludicrous explanation: "We're deferring to the Justice Department to answer some of these questions," Sams said, in order to "understand how this happened."
Really? Biden needs the DOJ to explain to him how he improperly kept classified documents from his decades-long career in the U.S. Senate and eight years as Vice President and then scattered them around the Mid-Atlantic? If you believe that, there's a bridge a Brooklyn you should have a look at...
More seriously, if Joe Biden needs the DOJ to explain to him how he took documents and left them at his office, home home, and his garage, he has no business having the nuclear codes.
Joe Scarborough jumped in to say that he doesn't "understand" how the White House's claims about Biden's serious handling of classified documents align with the facts — something many Americans have been yelling at their TV screens for weeks now.
Brzezinski attempted to double down on the questions, seemingly sensing that Sams was not ready to actually answer questions in the interview: "How in the world this could have happened?" she asked again.
Naturally, Sams couldn't answer the question without incriminating Biden and his either poor judgment or malicious actions, so he hid behind the claim that Biden needed to "respect" the special counsel's investigation.
Things got even worse when Morning Joe played soundbites from Democrat senators who have been critical of Biden's mishandling of classified documents. "Should Biden be embarrassed and was he surprised?" Sams was asked.
"The president said this himself last week, he was surprised to learn this," the WH Counsel's Office spokesman claimed. Because of course the man who takes classified documents "very seriously" would be "surprised" when classified documents were found in his office, house, and garage.
"The American people are smart enough to know what's going on here," Sams condescended. Technically, he's right, but not in the way he thinks. An ABC/Ipsos poll last week found that 64 percent of Americans believe Biden acted "inappropriately" in his handling of classified documents.
Sams' scrambling to change the topic saw him retreat to spinning about the CHIPS act and items entirely unrelated to Biden's mishandling of classified documents, but Brzezinski wasn't having any of it.
If the White House thought its attempts to tamp down negative press about Biden's latest scandal are succeeding or that Sams would turn to a friendly liberal network to get some sympathy, they couldn't have been more wrong.