Just a week ago, Joe Biden seemed to riding pretty high. Oh sure, the Republican party was retaking the House of Representatives, but it was doing so with far less members than they had hoped for, and the clown show of multiple votes that were held to appoint a Speaker of the House made the party look weak. Also, inflation finally seems to be letting up, and Biden's approval ratings were starting to rise.
But last week a story broke about how classified documents were discovered in his old office from his days as vice president during the Obama administration. A further search found more documents in his garage. While the White House tried to shrug all this off by saying that the documents were "inadvertently misplaced", it was not a good look. In fact, shortly thereafter Attorney General Merrick Garland was compelled to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter. Not surprisingly, this was all catnip to the right wing media, who immediately called Biden a hypocrite for previously condemning Trump for his hoarding of classified documents. Calls for his home to raided, like Trump's was, rang all over right wing media outlets.
Part of me wants to quickly point out that what Trump did was far worse; he took hundreds of classified documents to Mar-o-Lago, compared to the ten or so that Biden had. Perhaps even worse, when Trump was told by the Justice Department that he needed to return the documents, he did not return all of them, eventually prompting the FBI raid on his home. Unlike with Trump, there is no reason to believe that Biden intended to hold on to these documents, and he promptly returned them. Also, in an interview with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, Trump asserted that the documents in his home were declassified, because the president has the power to declassify documents just by thinking about it. Isn't it then reasonable to say that the documents found in Biden's possession were declassified because then president Barack Obama thought about it? That's only fair, right?
But jokes aside, this is a serious matter: Biden clearly was sloppy in his handling of the documents, and while that doesn't brand him the criminal that I think it does with Trump, it looks bad. Sadly, this could be the "Hillary's emails" scandal of the next election. Since most Americans don't follow politics that closely, many of them will just hear headlines about Biden and classified documents and assume he did the same thing as Trump. Of course, we have no way of knowing how much this story will affect the American public's feelings about Biden, and it may turn out to be more like the "Obama's tan suit scandal" than Hillary's emails. One thing though, the timing of this couldn't be any worse, because this could be the break Trump needs; now Merrick Garland is the tricky position of possibly prosecuting an ex president for the same crime that the current president will be widely perceived to also have done. So, like so many other times in his life, Trump will probably walk away from doing something terrible unscathed and emboldened. How such a horrible person can have so much luck throughout his life is the best argument against the existence of a god that I can think of.
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