AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Berman
The Biden administration has primarily been a victim of bad decisions and arrogance, but on occasion forces beyond its control. Over the last week, irony can be added to the list of nemeses.
News has broken that classified documents were “discovered” at Biden’s personal office which he had taken with him after leaving the White House in 2017. This discovery, which was apparently reported to the Justice Department on November 2, a week before Election Day, but which the DOJ chose not to disclose at the time for reasons which must roil Republicans, was followed this week by an admission from Biden aides that they had “discovered” a second batch of documents they had failed to turn over. This would be a minor, but real scandal in the past. After the raid on Mar-a-Lago this summer, it has compelled the appointment of a special counsel, and will almost certainly lead to wider congressional investigations.
Had thousands of classified documents been discovered at Al Gore’s personal office in 2002, it would hardly have made the news. Late night comics would have jumped at such a discovery in Dick Cheney’s residence in 2010, but it would have provoked humor, amusement, and perhaps confusion, but not serious outrage. Bill Clinton’s handling of classified material only made the news because of the bizarre way his former National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, tried to smuggle documents out of the National Archives by shoving them down his pants.
American government is serious business, or at least it used to be, and the outgoing administration remains in office right up until January 20th. Understandably, this has left limited time for the cataloguing of documents, and both parties accepted that full compliance was impossible, and errors were bound to occur.
Or at least, this was the understanding until Donald Trump. Just as Donald Trump’s election led to an escalation in the seriousness with which every single event was taken on the part of the media and political class, so too has this lack of perspective extended beyond his term in office. Former Trump administration officials have found themselves hounded, while patronage boards suddenly became targets of the Biden administration when they had been used in that manner for years.
Nothing, however, approached the level of escalation represented by the raid on Mar-a-Lago this summer, and the subsequent hysteria it generated. As I wrote at the time, the focus on whether classified documents should have been kept was beside the point. Just as Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and now Joe Biden failed to catalogue the status and location of every single document during their tumultuous transitions, Occam’s razor suggested the odds that Donald Trump might have had some documents that technically should have been at the Archives were fairly high. No FBI investigation was required to reach that conclusion.
The question was not whether such documents existed, but what should be done about them. This was a question not of national security, but of the national norms liberals have claimed to care so much about. Was this a matter to be taken in proportion, with an understanding of the precedents, and therefore treated as a sideshow between lawyers? Or was it to be treated as some sort of unprecedented breach of the public trust which required the use of force on the direct orders of the Attorney General?
George Bush did not use force against Bill Clinton after Sandy Berger was arrested. It now seems clear that Donald Trump did not use force against Joe Biden in 2017, despite evidence of classified documents at his personal office. Joe Biden, however, apparently decided to use force here. In the process, he made his own prior behavior relevant.
One of the major Democratic allegations against Donald Trump was that he sought to “politicize” the federal government. This charge was made despite Donald Trump refraining from firing Robert Mueller, and continuing to employ figures such as Christopher Krebs, who it has now been revealed worked with Twitter and other social media sites to censor information about Hunter Biden.
The basis for this allegation against Trump was the removal of James Comey, the FBI Director who had without a doubt made political decisions during the 2016 election which both favored and harmed Hillary Clinton, first by announcing an investigation into her emails and then by prematurely trying to clear her of any wrongdoing.
The major defense of the Mar-a-Lago raid was that it was professional and followed legal, rather than political guidelines – in other words, not the sort of thing Comey would have done in late 2016.
This raises serious questions about the transparency of the DOJ’s investigation of the Penn Biden Center. Sources have now revealed to NBC that the initial discovery of the classified documents occurred on November 2, 2022. The midterm elections were held on November 8. It is easy to imagine that the revelation that Biden had lied in 2018 when he told MSNBC “I don’t have access to classified information anymore” might have had an impact on the elections given the standard that had been applied to Trump. After all, Democrats were giving press conferences calling Trump a threat to national security.
This scandal could not come at a worse time for Democrats. Less than a week ago, they were mocking Republicans for being unable to organize the House. This week, every single Democrat voted against the creation of a special committee to investigate the weaponization of the DOJ, suggesting it was an unjustified witch hunt and a threat to the rule of law. The revelations about the timing of the DOJ’s discoveries combined with the double standard in how the two presidents were treated now has even partisan left-wing outlets like Vox on the defensive. They know it smells bad. But it is a crisis of Democrats’ own creation, a product of the double standard they have in fact applied.
It may be that the laid-back approach to the mishandling of classified documents that prevailed before this year was a healthier one. It may well be that the low-key way the Biden files were handled is appropriate. It may be that in not disclosing the details of an ongoing investigation, the FBI and DOJ were in fact following proper procedure for high-profile cases with political implications. But if so, they were not applying the same standards to Donald Trump. It is this double-standard that the newly organized Republican House majority should seek to investigate.
Daniel Berman is a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He also writes as Daniel Roman.
