Big Media wants us all to know just how frustratingly inconvenient the discovery of two sets of classified documents in the hands of President Joe Biden is.
Inconvenient for the Democrat activists in the press because they have to keep assuring the rubes that this case is so very different from the documents case involving former President Donald Trump. Inconvenient for Attorney General Merrick Garland because, to the untrained eye, it could look like he has one standard for his boss and another one for his boss’s once and possibly future election opponent. But, some helpfully point out, it is also inconvenient for Trump, because now he can’t accuse Biden of a crime without admitting he committed one.
The media, which breathlessly reported that the documents Trump hoarded included U.S. nuclear secrets that he could potentially sell to foreign adversaries, and even called for Trump’s execution(!), is working overtime to distinguish between the two cases. Biden only had a small number of classified documents they wrote, until yet another tranche was reported found in a separate Biden location. Biden’s lawyers immediately cooperated with the National Archives as soon as the documents were found at a place called the “Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement,” they point out, although the discovery was kept under wraps until after the November midterms.
But based on what we know so far, Trump should have no trouble condemning Biden without acknowledging his own guilt. For one, Biden squirreled away his documents after serving as vice president, a role that, unlike Trump’s, did not include the right to unilaterally declassify any federal document. Another big difference, especially in light of the fact that Biden’s documents are now reported to contain classified information about Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom, is that Biden has a son who spent much of his father’s vice presidency trading influence for lucrative deals and no-show jobs.
Trump’s documents were kept locked in a room at Mar-a-Lago while his lawyers haggled with the National Archives over their importance. At least the first batch of Biden documents, including top secret and “sensitive compartmented” information, was at a fake think tank that’s part of a university reportedly funded in part by $54 million in China-linked donations. If you’re curious about who had access to them, then you clearly don’t work for the Justice Department, The New York Times, or the Washington Post.
Perhaps the starkest difference between the two cases is the behavior of both the media and the Justice Department. Instead of wildly speculating about what Biden was hiding, the press is running interference for him. And while the FBI raided Trump’s home and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to probe the ex-president, the Justice Department so far seems content to treat Biden’s case as one big misunderstanding.
We still don’t know what the documents recovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in an unprecedented August raid pertained to, but we’ll eventually find out – as long as it can be portrayed as sufficiently damning. But don’t bet on Garland to ask tough questions in Biden’s case. So far, it feels more like an effort to get in front, not to the bottom, of something.