Don’t get me wrong, there should absolutely be an investigation. There is the fact that there were unaccounted for classified documents. Even if nothing criminal occurred, it should be found how that happened so that procedures can be changed to prevent it from happening.
But the two cases are already different, in that the documents that Biden had were voluntarily handed over. No warrant was needed. No intentional fakery was involved. No documents were moved, with a lawyer signing a false statement that there are no more documents.
How about another scenario; one guy is seen slipping off a cliff and falls to his death, and on a nearby cliff a person is seen angrily arguing with another, and then shoves the person off the cliff. You’d investigate both, but one is a murder investigation while the other is presumed to be an accident. You don’t dismiss either, but it’s wrong to equate the scenarios.
Y’all are over-reacting here. Is it importune? Yes. Damaging, no. Only to people like D_Anconia, who will think the worst of any Democrat doing anything.
Until I know more about this, I see it like this: Say you work in the anthrax lab. You know damn well that you’re not supposed to leave the anthrax out where someone may get a wiff of it. But you do it anyway. So did that other guy.
Now that other guy denied that he did it, hell he even claimed that the anthrax belonged to him and leave his anthrax alone.
You admitted that you did it, and you put the anthrax away properly.
But you weren’t supposed to fuck with the anthrax in the first place, and you knew that.
That’s disappointing.
This is unbelievably, gigantically, irretrievably horrible news.
The true parallel to this is the couple of documents found in the government storage unit to which staffers took bales of material. We’re going to learn that White House staffers are like low-level minions everywhere. They may mean well, but sometimes screw up. No big deal, except when it becomes one.
This will become one. No facts will matter. No nuances will be heard. Biden will be vilified by all right-wing outlets. It will contaminate all future trials of Trump’s predations.
In any sane world, this accident would be a dismissible nothing. We don’t live in a sane world. This is a disaster for the left.
When a Democrat does something that looks (or is) questionable, it’s immediately an impeachable or even a hanging offense.
If a Republican does the same thing or worse, it’s nothing, fake news, media persecution, etc. IOWARDI.
As an illustration, I submit this excerpt from a letter to the editor that appeared in the San Antonio Express-News this morning. Absurd, but typical thinking from the Right wing:
…
Why the big fuss over George Santos, a newly elected representative from Long Island who embellished his résumé?
The biggest liar of all is at the top; President Joe Biden’s latest Purple Heart yarn for his Uncle Frank is beyond the pale. Supposedly, Joe Biden Sr., who had been deceased for six years, approached him as the new veep in ’08 to get Uncle Frank his Purple Heart. Uncle Frank had been dead nine years. But according to Biden, they all got together and gave it to him.
How about Biden’s resignation? The sooner the better if lying is the standard.
If Biden broke the wall willfully, then he should be prosecuted. I suspect this was an oversight and note that he is cooperating and the documents returned. No word on classification level or if they are still classified. That won’t stop the right wingers from overloading the Facebook servers with their total outrage.
If you are thinking about a possible Trump trial, there already was massive prejudicial pretrial publicity on both sides. Finding unbiased jurors would be almost impossible, with or without this.
My biggest personal bias may be against the system of document classification.
Trump stole.documents that were property of the national archives and, if not taken back from him, would likely have been, one day, sold for high prices, at auction, by his heirs. This might have been the most valuable one he took:
By contrast, classified documents are probably worthless, because you can’t sell them on the open market. It’s true that there are some classified documents the government of Russia or China might pay for. These would mostly be either detailed technical plans for U.S. weapons or the names of U.S. spies abroad. I hope and expect the documents in question are not in those categories.
Note that if these documents date from Biden’s time as Vice President, they are at least 6 years old if not older.
Factually speaking, this is likely to be a nothingburger. Someone accidentally packed a few documents they shouldn’t have, and the documents sat undisturbed for a decade in a closet. (Of course a full investigation to should take place to confirm or refute this; likely a lot of such investigation has already happened.)
Equally factually: consumers of right-wing news will never hear anything mitigating and will be told incessantly that this was a Biden crime that dwarfs anything Donald may have been accused of doing.
That’s the world we live in. The only thing that could possibly be done about it would be for enough people to call for Fox News to be opt-in instead of (as is the case) guaranteed carrier fees that make their lying profitable. If Fox News were defanged in this way, the remaining outlets (Newsmax, Breitbart etc.) would have far less sway, reverting to what right wing CT media was pre-Reagan: the fringe.
Yes, and it would be great if the report contained some pithy descriptions of the situation–ones that could be used to refute the ‘Biden is History’s Greatest Criminal’ claimants.
Hopefully and probably this will be investigated thoroughly. Key will be this finding - were the documents stolen and hidden, or accidentally misplaced?
All inquiries by congress should be answered by one of Trump’s inane “I can do whatever I want filings,” with his name crossed out in black sharpie and Biden’s scribbled in above.
I don’t know who might have access to that office and it makes me sad to say it, but I would have no problem believing that they were planted by someone who adores Trump.
It wouldn’t just be “someone who adores Trump”; they’d have to have access to documents that might plausibly have been held by Biden during his Vice Presidency. That’s a whole other level of conspiracy.
I don’t have any problem believing that Biden (or indeed any President or VP) might end up with a few government documents mixed in with their other papers when they move out. The real test is what happens once they’re found.
