Like more than a few Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) embarrassed himself this morning on the Biden documents case. He said President Biden is “diminished” by the situation. On Trump and Biden: “At its heart, the issue is the same. Those documents should not have been in the personal possession of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump,” he said. In each case, after whacking Biden around a bit, he went on to lamely distinguish between the two situations. Those distinctions, needless to say, will never be the headlines, never garner attention, never be what shapes news coverage. Manchin of course was worse, saying Biden “should have a lot of regrets” and questioning whether we know whether Biden’s or Trump’s actions are more egregious.

Ron Klain, White House Chief of Staff, will reportedly announce he’s departing the position shortly. I have no inside knowledge of what’s behind this. I suspect it’s mostly the reality that there’s a short half life to the position itself. Indeed, rattling around my head for 20 years is a Klain anecdote in which he told his staff, when departing as Al Gore’s Chief of Staff in 1999, that the position is ”like a milk carton, and milk cartons have an expiration date.” I doubt it is about any substantive disagreements about anything

The only thing I can think to add about the transition is that this period is a major transition regardless. The next two years will be very, very different from the last two. There aren’t going to be any big legislative initiatives — no trying to get House progressives somehow on board with whatever new demand comes from Manchin and Sinema. That’s done. It will be about two things: First, seeing whether the House Freedom Caucus breaks the Republic or whether they are in turn broken by President Biden. Second, laying the groundwork for the 2024 election in which everything will be on the line. The outcome of the first largely determines the possibilities for the second.

Given this shift it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw a few more personnel changes. It’s just a very different brief.

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.