For 13 hours, FBI agents searched Joe Biden’s home in Delaware and tracked down six more top secret documents.
It was the president himself who opened the door for them, saying, “See if you find other things that we couldn’t find….” They found them, and the controversy widene.
The president, who has always claimed he had no knowledge of the presence of the top secret documents, is in fact exposing himself to devastating image damage because the parallels with Trump’s misconduct are immediately triggered.
The key difference is that Biden and his lawyers are cooperating and have called on the DOJ and FBI to execute all searches without objecting, as Trump’s legal team had done. The political damage, however, may become significant especially since the White House staff delayed in revealing to the public that 12 top secret documents had been tracked down not only in Biden’s former offices in Washington (when he was vice president) but also in the garage of his Delaware residence, where they had ended up in boxes next to a blazing green vintage Corvette.
The other 6 files identified after 13 hours of searching could end the DOJ’s search, but not end the political and media embarrassment to which the White House and Biden himself have exposed themselves.
There are those who also argue that the acceleration in the announcement of future resignation by Ron Klain, the president’s powerful chief of staff who is the de facto custodian of all his behavior and the public messages that Biden has to convey to the nation, may be precisely due to the poor handling of communication on this hot issue conducted in an erratic and amateurish manner.
Klain was Biden’s chief of staff even when he was Obama’s vice president and in fact the last to turn out the lights and close the door to the old offices where the top secret documents were abandoned 6 years ago.
The announcement of the new discovery yesterday with 6 more “top secret” files for Republicans is genuine free gasoline on the fire of controversy, because now they can say that Trump and Biden did the same thing by compromising the nation’s secrets.
The two special prosecutors assigned to their respective cases, however, are almost certain to come to different conclusions. Trump deliberately claimed that those documents belonged to him and tried to block their seizure. Biden did the opposite and was the one who informed the Justice Department and the State Archives that he had found himself holding files that should not be there and was eager to return them to close the case.
No matter. The lack or carelessness probably the work of some Democratic staff official was committed, but it will be the president himself who will pay the political consequences, since the criminal or criminal ones in his case do not seem to be there.
