Joe Biden ran for president three times before he finally won the White House. And 2020 was simply the perfect time for him to give it another go.
As he neared 80, Biden had slowed down considerably from his rambunctious days as a senator and vice president. But with the emergence of COVID, Biden barely hit the campaign trail, running his operation out of the basement of his Delaware mansion.
And let’s be frank: many Americans had tired of President Donald Trump’s act. Many independents who decided to give the outsider a shot in 2016 broke hard for Biden in 2020.
But Biden’s usefulness may have expired. While the president has declared he plans to run again in 2024, at least one lawmaker thinks Democrats are planning to jettison him for a better candidate.
They may have just the right formula. The discovery of classified documents in Biden’s garage and the U.S. attorney general’s recent appointment of a special counsel to probe the matter gives Democrats a vehicle to weaken Biden.
“I mean, there’s an element of this where it’s Joe Biden’s lawyer who turns this information over, it’s Joe Biden’s own Justice Department that’s appointed a special counsel to investigate him,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told Fox News Digital.
“There’s an element to this that feels like the Democrats are taking out Joe Biden,” Gaetz said. “I don’t know that that’s the case, but I don’t know that it’s not.”
“Maybe the Democrats have realized that Joe Biden is not useful to them anymore, and they just assume toss him out and get a younger crop of candidates engaged in the next presidential race,” he said. “But just as Joe Biden is hardening the cement around his decision to run for president again, they start looking for what classified documents might have been tucked away eight years ago.”
In the last couple of months, three batches of Obama administration-era classified documents have been found on Biden’s properties: one batch at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and two at his Wilmington, Delaware, home.
The first batch was found just days before the 2022 midterm elections, but the Department of Justice didn’t release the info until this month.
“We have a lot to learn about the content and substance of those documents, and if they relate to China, and if they were at that Biden Center at UPenn funded by China. That’s going to be a far more grave concern,” Gaetz said.
“What if the documents relate to our economy?” he said. “What if Joe Biden was hustling information to his CCP [Chinese Communist Party] funders at the Biden Center for UPenn and that gave China economic advantage over Americans? That would create a nexus between those documents and our economic woes at the hands of rising China.”
Gaetz acknowledged that everything is speculative until the contents of the recovered documents are revealed.
“I haven’t been frothing at the mouth over the mere existence of some documents in a garage in Delaware,” he said. “You know, I believe Americans are more worried about the weaponization of government against them than they are, you know, what papers Joe Biden stuffed in [the] glove box of his Corvette.”
“If they are mementos or, you know, documents that have far outlived any sort of functional relevance quite some time ago, then I think that’s different,” Gaetz said.
After 68 days of silence, Biden on Thursday finally commented on the fiasco.
“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place. We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department. We’re fully cooperating, looking forward to getting this resolved quickly,” Biden said.
“I think you’re gonna’ find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets. I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. That’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no there there.”
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.