President Biden suffered another embarrassment today when it turned out that there was a second batch of classified documents in a location that is so far undisclosed, but is different from the Penn office where the first classified documents were discovered. This is obviously embarrassing for the Democrats, given that they were hoping to indict Donald Trump for having classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago basement.
The White House’s response to these discoveries is laughable, given the vigor with which Biden has denounced Trump as “irresponsible” for possessing classified information. Today Peter Doocy cross-examined Karine Jean-Pierre on several topics, with the newly-found classified materials coming in the middle:
Poor Karine has nothing better to say than that Biden’s lawyers did the right thing after they found the illegally-purloined–if you believe the Democrats–files. Congratulations to the lawyers! But of course, that was never the question. The question is why Biden took classified documents away from the White House and left them in various locations for a period of years in the first place.
In reality, nothing about this story is a big deal. All presidents and vice-presidents take documents with them when they leave the White House. And over-classification is endemic in the executive branch. The most trivial documents are likely to be deemed confidential or secret. Even top secret documents, when they have been made public, generally seem pedestrian. I suppose that a high percentage of the pieces of paper that a president sees in the Oval Office are classified, so that, if he wants to take a few boxes home with him to work on his memoirs, they inevitably will include quite a few classified pieces of paper.
This is not very important, or at least it wasn’t when prior presidents did it. It is only because the Democrats saw an opportunity to attack Donald Trump–maybe put him in jail!–that the subject of ex-presidents (or in Biden’s case, an ex-vice president) possessing classified materials has even come up. What Trump did was trivial, and what Biden did was, as far as we know so far, also trivial. But it represents another exploding cigar in the Democrats’ endless efforts to destroy Trump, once and for all.
