Drip-Drip-Drip
If I invite you into my home, and allow you to search, do you really “seize” anything? The FBI this weekend found six more classified documents in the home of a President, this time, the sitting President, Joseph R. Biden. Some of the classified documents go back to Biden’s thirty years in the Senate, and some are in his own handwriting. If Joe and Jill found them, they would hand them over to the FBI. Seizure sounds like it was dragged from their clutching hands, like seizing the scissors from a three year-old. It might be an unnecessarily aggressive word.
Wait – one beat – so if Senator, or Vice President, or President Biden writes something down, it can become classified and then subject to document storage requirements? If he takes notes in a classified meeting, notes to assist him in making a decision – those notes are classified and therefore he can’t “have them” with him?
I guess the answer to that question is yes. So six more documents are added to the agonizing drip-drip-drip of bad news for the Biden Administration.
The media describes it like a Special Victims Unit television show: well the search was “consensual”, so there was no “assault” like the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The Biden’s are OK with the invasion of FBI into their home. And they didn’t find anything to incriminate Hunter! One down, at least one more to go, the vacation home in Rehoboth Beach. That has to be coming soon.
Burn the Tapes
When the Courts demanded that Richard Nixon turn over the audio tapes proving his own guilt in the Watergate crisis, some of Nixon’s advisors told him to burn ‘em. Nixon had this vision of a bonfire on the White House lawn, as he tossed tape after tape onto the flames, burning away all proof of his guilt, dancing around the flames as the press and FBI watch helplessly. He didn’t do that, and four years later told an interviewer he regretted not taking that dramatic step.
Joe Biden is the President of the United States. He, unlike an unnamed former President, still does have the power to declassify material. Maybe he just ought to declassify all of the documents his lawyers, staff, and the FBI has found in his possession. Like Nixon burning the tapes; “Whadda U gonna do about it?”
Biden won’t do that. The Democratic Party took a stand in the last decade – “We are the ‘good guys’, we will not only follow the law, but we won’t take advantage of our power”. A couple of pictures come out, and Al Franken resigned. Congressman Katie Hill left when she had an affair with her Chief of Staff. Republican Congressman George Santos lies, cheats, and who know what else, but stays in office. Biden isn’t going to get out of this by de-classifying everything. Instead, he’s going to “stew” in this mess, until all of the classified documents in Biden’s private residences and offices are finally outed.
Junior High Math
From a raw politics point of view I guess he’s lucky. It’s hard for Republicans to take advantage of Biden when Trump did the same thing. You can’t “nail” Biden, when it took a NON–CONSENSUAL search, requiring a SEARCH WARRANT (bold and loud to try to draw the distinction) to get Trump’s classified documents.
Why doesn’t Biden just tell the truth: his staff packed his papers – and they didn’t get the classified materials out of them? The problem with that is that it makes Biden look “taken care of”, like packing up your parents’ house to send them to the senior citizens home. Worse than looking like he ignored the law; that would make Biden look helpless. No one wants a helpless eighty-year old man as President. Better to be a scofflaw.
So, my Democratic friends, swallow hard. There’s no good way out of this, no way to spin this into a good Biden thing. The best I can offer is “old math” from my Junior High days. We learned to multiply and divide fractions by “cancelling out” numbers on the top with numbers on the bottom (thank goodness I don’t have to really remember how that worked). I’m sure in today’s “new” math, they don’t do that. Surely, we are no longer a culture of mathematical cancellation.
But we still cancel-out in American politics. And as long as Donald Trump is a number in the fraction, that cancels out Biden’s classified document indiscretions. The danger: come 2024 if there isn’t a matching “number” on the other side, Biden becomes more vulnerable. If Trump isn’t the candidate, we are going to spend all of the Biden campaign talking about “addled, old Joe” who doesn’t know when he’s got hot papers in his hand.
