US President Joe Biden had hoped to put the mishandling of sensitive government files behind him. Instead, the emergence of another batch of classified material now has his own party upset at him.
(Bloomberg) — US President Joe Biden had hoped to put the mishandling of sensitive government files behind him. Instead, the emergence of another batch of classified material now has his own party upset at him.
Rather than close ranks, Democratic allies responded with exasperation and growing concern to news over the weekend that FBI agents had recovered more secret documents from Biden’s home in Delaware. It’s the second such discovery since his lawyers declared the search had concluded.
Biden should be “embarrassed by the situation,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, said the crisis meant Biden no longer held the moral high ground on an issue that had hurt Donald Trump, the former president and Biden’s 2024 rival. An FBI search last year of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence revealed he had taken boxes of classified material with him to Florida.
At this point, the optics for Biden are not just embarrassing. The president is defending himself from Republican attacks and the fact that both he and Trump face special counsel probes. The newest disclosure intensified questions about the initial search for classified documents and Biden’s office and homes.
The differences between his case and that of Trump remain. Trump refused to hand the material over, while Biden voluntarily disclosed the matter and documents were secured in national archives facilities. That nuance though will increasingly be lost on a broader electorate surprised as to why new Biden files keep turning up.
Americans are still separating Biden’s conduct from Trump, but most think the matter deserves scrutiny. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday showed that 77% said Trump handled classified documents inappropriately while 64% said the same about Biden.
As Durbin puts it, “when that information is found, it diminishes the stature of any person who is in possession of it, because it’s not supposed to happen. Whether it was the fault of a staffer or attorney, it makes no difference.”
This latest batch will give more ammunition to Republicans eager to take attention away from their own dysfunction and launching a congressional probe into Biden’s possession of classified materials, on top of other inquiries into his administration and family.
“Obviously the drip drip drip isn’t helpful,” said Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic strategist. “That’s where the downside is ‘okay, you give your enemies an unforced error and they’re going to take, particularly this group of MAGA Republicans is going to go absolutely outrage.”
An FBI search of a sitting president’s home clearly escalated the stakes for Biden, coming after the president and White House officials repeatedly denied there was intentional wrongdoing and downplayed the legal and political magnitude of the situation.
“It freezes whatever momentum he had,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist who ran Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Anything that’s bad for Biden politically is good for Republicans politically.”
It also comes as Biden’s own team is undergoing a transition.
The president is widely expected to run for re-election but is also losing his longtime confidante Ron Klain as chief of staff and replacing him with Jeff Zients, a move that would elevate the former Covid-19 czar to one of the top jobs in Washington.
The nearly 13-hour search of Biden’s home heightened comparisons to the FBI’s hunt for classified material last summer at Mar-a-Lago. In Florida, the FBI was executing a search warrant after months of refusals by Trump to turn over the documents; in Delaware, it was consensual.
Biden “should have a lot of regrets” and acknowledge his handling of classified documents was “irresponsible” and “a mistake,” centrist Democratic Senator Joe Manchin said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Manchin has been a thorn in Biden’s side, sinking the president’s original social spending proposal in 2021. But the West Virginia senator also wants special counsel Robert Hur to finish his probe on Biden and avoid “making a political circus.”
“Both Dick Durbin and Joe Manchin, they understand that the president is acting responsibly,” Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House counsel’s office, said Monday on MSNBC. “When it comes to the standing of the president with the American people, they can see that he is taking this course of action of believing in the rule of law and being cooperative with the Justice Department.”
The latest discovery raised more questions about the thoroughness of the original search. It was conducted by personal lawyers to Biden who lacked security clearances and his team decided to keep the findings quiet for months only to then release them on a piecemeal basis after news outlets found out about the documents.
“No question, some people may make political hay out of it,” said Joel Benenson, a strategist on both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
He added: “Democrats have commented on it. When people are deciding in 2024 what they’re going to do, I think they’re going to evaluate the candidates and whose going to do the most to help them in their lives.”
–With assistance from Akayla Gardner and Mark Niquette.
(Adds comment from White House spokesman in 18th paragraph)
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