Ex-Vice President Mike Pence has clear designs on Joe Biden’s job. But for now, the potential 2024 Republican candidate may have done the president a favor. And he might also have done one last service to his old boss, Donald Trump.
Ex-Vice President Mike Pence has clear designs on Joe Biden’s job. But for now, the potential 2024 Republican candidate may have done the president a favor. And he might also have done one last service to his old boss, Donald Trump.
The discovery of classified documents in Pence’s home in Indiana, as first reported by CNN Tuesday, took the heat off Biden’s struggles to explain his possession of such material from his own vice presidency. And it made Pence the most popular man in the White House Tuesday. For one thing, the rumbling saga of secret documents had a new front man.
This was a huge embarrassment for Pence, exposing him to mockery and accusations of hypocrisy since he’d claimed moral high ground over Biden when the president was under fire for keeping documents and the Indiana Republican said he didn’t have any.
Biden’s aides leapt at the chance to draw a more innocuous comparison between the behavior of the president and Pence than the more damaging one that’s been suggested for days between Biden and Trump, who appears to be in far greater trouble over his classified documents storm.
And at first sight, the comparison seems fair. Neither Pence nor Biden appeared to obstruct investigators once modest batches of documents were discovered at their homes – even if the White House’s management of the crisis has been sluggish and sometimes misleading to the public. Both returned the material when it was found. And each may argue that the transfer of material to their private homes was accidental.
One official told CNN Chief White House Correspondent Phil Mattingly that the Pence case was a “helpful example” of another former vice president dealing with issues arising from a transition out of office. The source also noted that Pence, like Biden, previously said he had no knowledge of having classified documents.
Trump by contrast had hundreds of documents, claimed they were his, appeared to cover up what he had, accused the FBI of planting incriminating material and even bizarrely claimed that he had the power to declassify them with a private thought.
Still, while the Pence revelations clearly do Biden a favor, they also provide an inadvertent political opening for Trump. That’s because it may be difficult for many voters not steeped in the details of the document saga to distinguish the nuances of the trio of cases. The more such stashes are unearthed, and the more top current and former executive branch officials are involved, the more it seems that such discoveries are no big deal or that everyone involved is equally at fault.
There appear to still be clear legal grounds to show that Trump’s retention of hundreds of documents when he left office – as well as attempts to stop their return and to obstruct the investigation – could reach the level of criminality.
