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\nOur political media really want you to know that Joe Biden\u2019s classified document controversy is completely different from Donald Trump\u2019s. And, as soon as CBS News reported that Attorney General Merrick Garland had assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review how \u201croughly 10\u201d classified documents ended up in President Biden\u2019s office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, pundits and reporters began trying to mitigate the political fallout and diffuse claims of a double standard.
In today\u2019s Politico Playbook, \u201ccourts guru\u201d Josh Gerstein tells us that one of the distinctions \u201cworth noting\u201d between the two incidents is that there are fewer documents at stake, \u201cabout 300 in the Trump case versus \u2018a small number\u2019 at the think tank.\u201d
Listen, I\u2019m no guru, but I was unaware that there was a \u201csmall number\u201d exemption in the laws pertaining to the mishandling of classified information. After all, Clinton\u2019s National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who was about to testify in front of the 9\/11 Commission, stuffed copies of a single classified report down his pants in 2004. He was sentenced to two years of probation and 100 hours of community service, was stripped of his security clearance, and lost his law license. As a legal and political matter, the attempted destruction of a single report detailing the Clinton administration\u2019s failures regarding Islamic terrorism mattered quite a bit at the time. Certainly, it\u2019s not just a matter of numbers.
Nevertheless, Gerstein argues that it\u2019s not unusual \u201cfor small numbers of emails or documents that are classified to get mixed in with unclassified records,\u201d but it is \u201chard to argue you don\u2019t know what\u2019s lying around your house if there\u2019s a lot of it.\u201d
Is it? The media keeps mentioning this \u201cthink tank\u201d to convince readers that it\u2019s all just a big misunderstanding. I mean, who does anything wrong at a think tank, right? Of course, the institution in question was home to Biden\u2019s personal office at a \u201cjob\u201d he held with the University of Pennsylvania from 2017-19 \u2014 where he made nearly a million dollars for nine visits to the actual school (one of them to sell his novel, \u201cPromise Me, Dad.\u201d) Does Trump know what\u2019s \u201clying around\u201d his 62,500-square-foot, 58-bedroom home any more than Biden does his office? Maybe. It is almost surely the case that security at this larger residence, provided by the Secret Service, is as good as what one might find on the sixth-floor office of a \u201cthink tank\u201d in the middle of D.C.
The \u201cwhere\u201d doesn\u2019t really matter.
In truth, most fights over classified documents are overblown. Who knows? Maybe both Biden and Trump accidentally lifted classified documents. Or maybe both hand-picked embarrassing documents they didn\u2019t want made public and took them. (Unmentioned in most stories is the fact that vice presidents have fewer privilege than presidents when handling sensitive documents.) Maybe they\u2019re both lying about how many documents they have. Maybe neither of them knew. The one major difference right now, as Joy Behar might say, is that Biden is given \u201cthe benefit of the doubt.\u201d
In its initial report on the Mar-a-Lago raid, The had insinuated that Trump had snuck nuclear codes out of the White House. Hysterics like Michael Hayden and Michael Beschloss wanted the former president dragged to the electric chair for selling secrets to the Ruskies. As with every Trump story, it was prudent to wait. We still don\u2019t know what documents were in his possession.
The same goes goes for Biden. CNN reports that two sources \u2014 both, almost certainly connected to Biden \u2014 say that the former vice president was in possession of \u201cintelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.\u201d Those topics seem quite relevant. Where is the outrage? CNN tempers the news by assuring us that the \u201cvast majority of the items in the office contained personal Biden family documents, including materials about Beau Biden\u2019s funeral arrangements and condolence letters.\u201d One assumes that the vast majority of boxes at Mar-a-Lago are also teeming with personal business. It\u2019s completely irrelevant. As is CNN\u2019s preposterous embedded infographic comparing the two cases \u2014 Biden is \u201ccooperating\u201d with his own administration, it notes, but Trump is \u201cunder investigation for obstruction,\u201d and so on.
The highly curated leaks from Biden\u2019s people are meant to get in front of the news. That\u2019s their job. The political media, in turn, repeated, nearly verbatim, what they are told. That\u2019s not their job. Their job is to be as skeptical of Biden\u2019s contentions as they were of Trump\u2019s or Clinton\u2019s. The president, after all, has proven to be an inveterate liar.<\/p>\n