MSNBC host Joe Scarborough held nothing back on Monday’s broadcast, ripping into President Joe Biden’s administration over what he thought was sloppy handling of the still-unfolding situation involving a number of classified documents discovered in the president’s possession.
Scarborough — along with his co-host and spouse Mika Brzezinski — appeared concerned that the Biden administration was having a hard time getting out in front of the story, arguing that the way it was coming out in short bursts was effectively death by a thousand paper cuts.
“It’s the drip, drip, drip that’s the problem right now. It’s a story they can’t totally seem to get their arms around,” Scarborough said, saying that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre seemed unprepared at best and arguing that it would have made far more sense to bring in someone who was more familiar with the national security implications of Biden having the documents in his possession.
Scarborough suggested that retired Admiral John Kirby, who is currently serving as coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, might be a good choice in that regard.
“By stumbling and bumbling around, by not getting their timeline right, by still saying, — we just showed a graphic that says — ‘an unknown number of documents found in Biden’s garage.’ No more unknown. No more unknowns,” Scarborough continued, adding, “At this stage, we’re two months in. They need to clean this up. They need to get, you know, amateur hour is over. They need complete transparency, and they just mishandled it from day one … I’m only saying it because it’s true.”
Scarborough is far from the only person to criticize the way the Biden administration has handled the response to the discovery of the documents. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said in a recent op-ed — published by Fox News — that Biden may have set himself up for failure when he claimed that the documents had been moved by accident. He argued that the fact that documents had been found in more than one location lent credibility to the idea that they had been moved intentionally.
Podcast host Joe Rogan took things a bit further, arguing that the administration’s response to the situation led him to believe that people within Biden’s own team were looking to have him exit the White House.