Different, But the Same

Joe Biden, as Vice President, kept classified documents in a safe at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington after he left office. Lawyers found them. The United States Attorney is investigating.

Donald Trump was President of the United States when he took classified documents to Florida. As President, Trump could de-classify documents. Biden was not President at the time and did not have that power.

The number of documents Biden had was far smaller, and we do not know the classification level. Some of Trump’s were “top secret.” Trump kept documents after claiming he had returned all of them and yet still had many. We don’t know if Biden certified or not that he had no classified documents.

I think, however, people are missing the biggest detail when going for a tit-for-tat in a story with differences in the fact pattern, e.g., the volume, the prior negotiations or lack thereof, the classification level, the nature of the documents, etc.

The real big thing for me is this one:

The material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed. The documents were discovered when Mr. Biden's personal attorneys "were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.," Sauber said in a statement to CBS News. The documents were contained in a folder that was in a box with other unclassified papers, the sources said. The sources revealed neither what the documents contain nor their level of classification. A source familiar with the matter told CBS News the documents did not contain nuclear secrets. 

So it happened before the election, and the political apparatus of the President’s Administration covered it up. That, to me, seems like a very big deal. Undoubtedly it would have been a very big news story if it came right before the election. But no one in Washington, from the Department of Justice to the FBI to the United States Attorney, breathed a word of it until after the election.

I have no doubt in my mind that they knew there’d be political implications, and the supposedly non-political Justice Department worked to keep it quiet to protect the President.

The House GOP should investigate this. They might want to escalate it over the Hunter Biden investigations as this goes straight to the heart of a matter also affecting Donald Trump. Moreso, I think it is harder to charge Trump with a crime related to classified document retention when Joe Biden himself did it.

Hunter Biden Investigation Postponed

Speaking of the Hunter Biden investigation, the House Oversight Committee made a very big deal about it right after the election. I criticized them mightily for saying that would be their first investigation.

To be clear, my position was not that they should avoid the investigation but that they should not prioritize it over all other investigations. It would send a signal that the House GOP was directly set on revenge instead of instilling confidence back in government.

Whether they listened to me or not, the House GOP has had a change of heart. they will not go forward with the Hunter Biden investigation yet. Instead, the House Oversight Committee has decided to first look into how the federal government spent money on COVID.

There is a ton of waste, fraud, and abuse out there. There are oddities in the spending and partisan gamesmanship too. This is a really good approach, and I am glad they changed their mind.