Members-Only Article
For those of you who remember the embarrassment of the Times coverage of the “Whitewater” scandal, it must seem like déjà vu all over again. It does to me. The paper’s editors are trying, and I mean really trying, to make the Biden classified documents issue a thing. And I mean a grave thing. The stage was ably set by the subject line of the email I received blasting out their latest deep dive on the story: “Inside Biden’s 68 days of silence.” It’s this like a Gabriel García Márquez homage? I mean good lord. Are we really doing this again? Of course we are. It’s how they roll.
I took the liberty of a short set of annotations.
You can see the air of fateful and perhaps fatal errors, consequences that could shake the Biden presidency. There is the repeated effort to elevate a fairly mundane set of facts into something Shakespearean in its scope. The Biden “strategy” was to completely cooperate to show that the whole thing was just a good faith error, nothing like President Trump’s antics. And yet the “strategy” was “profoundly influenced by the Trump case.”
I mean, what? Not committing crimes and not trying to retain government property is a pretty good policy in general and one Biden likely would have followed on his own. It also in the nature of the things makes for a pretty stark contrast with Trump’s behavior. Was it “profoundly influenced by the Trump case”? It’s hard to see how this is clear if there’s no reason to think Biden would have done anything different if the Trump thing had never happened. The fact that the President’s lawyers obviously knew the Trump case was ongoing is true but does it actually mean anything?
What we have here is a case where someone working for the now-President was sloppy and commingled a number of classified documents in with various of Biden’s presidential papers. It’s quite unlikely in the nature of things that Biden himself was the one who did this. And there’s little reason to think whoever did had any bad intent. They were discovered when the papers were being moved from Biden’s Penn Center. They were immediately turned over to the National Archives. The DOJ was immediately notified. Once those were found they decided to comb through the records stored at Biden’s home. They found a few more. They immediately turned those over too.
There’s simply not a lot of meat on this bone. But there’s so much appetite for the bone that doesn’t really seem to matter. It’s both an opportunity to curry a bit of bothsidesist favor since most mainstream media reporters primarily focus on how not to be accused of liberal bias. (I know them. This is true.) But perhaps even more than that there are the cinematic qualities, fateful decisions with unknown and potentially grave consequences into the future. The over-clever and perhaps naive belief that completely cooperating would create the impression of complete cooperation.
The bigs really, REALLY want this one.
